3 ms·
Minor >> Underutilized may not be the best way to think about it. There is a lot of redundancy that affords protection against mutations.
by Terribledactyl 11y ago
Minor >> Underutilized may not be the best way to think about it. There is a lot of redundancy that affords protection against mutations.
- veddox 11y agoAnd actually, even the redundancy is not complete. A recent paper showed that seemingly "redundant" variations of triplets led to a slightly different 3D folding structure of the DNA, with effects on the physiology of the cell.
- sciencerobot 11y agodid the have an effect on the translated amino acid sequence or translation? Do you have a reference?
- veddox 11y agohttp://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2014.00140/abstract http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2014.00... Sorry, made a mistake in the comment above. It's not the DNA's structure that is changed, it's the resulting protein's. (Different codons slightly alter the rate of translation, leading to a different folding of the protein.)
- sciencerobot 11y agoThanks for replying with the reference. That is very interesting
- dibujante 11y agoYou're absolutely right. The likelihood that any particular amino acid-generating codon will mutate to another amino acid-generating codon is non-uniform and the analysis of what impact these particular redundancies has on that is very complex - sometimes, certain amino acids can even stand in for each other. Certain mutations from one acid to another are more desirable than others, so it's quite possible that the existing structure biases the amino acids towards certain least harmful mutation tendencies. The whole thing is pretty fascinating.