3 ms·
Life with Longer Genetic Codes Seems Possible – But Less Likely
- PaulHoule 5y agoIf you had radically more than 20 amino acids (say 200) you'd have to have radically more metabolic pathways to handle them. Seems like you'd run into diminishing returns. Meanwhile from the viewpoint of synthetic biology we can reassign some of the 64 possibilities to new amino acids so we have plenty of room with 3 codons.