3 ms·

Radix is important for digit-efficiency, but in a biological system that's not necessarily related to molecule size efficiency.

• pythonguython 3y ago
  I’m also failing to see how digit efficiency would be important in DNA. In fact, it seems that a high base system would be more efficient. If you had 80 nucleobases instead of 4, each base pair would contain far more information
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > If you had 80 nucleobases instead of 4, each base pair would contain far more information Which is a problem given DNA is a lossy format.
    • Llamamoe 3y ago
      Strictly speaking, you could encode more error-correction bits into a higher nucleobase count but that'd pretty much require intelligent design, and wouldn't necessarily be viable for microorganisms to have that many proteins handling all the metabolic scaffolding.
  • asimpletune 3y ago
    The efficiency comes from the ratio of the alphabet to the number of character places needed to express them. Otherwise why not base a million? Or a billion? This ratio is what leads to base e being the theoretical maximum.