Betül Kaçar
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
amino acids.
So we use six life uses 64 possible states minus four of the starts and stops to code for 20 amino acids in different combinations.
That is really amazing.
If you think about there, there are 500 different amino acids life can choose, right?
It's,
Narrowed it down to 20.
We don't know why.
A lot of people think about this genetic code is quite fascinating.
So far, right?
I mean, it didn't do it for 4 billion years.
I don't know.
We may wait for another 4 billion years.
We don't know.
So we would be fooling ourselves if we said we know exactly how many amino acids existed early on.
But there's no reason to think that it wasn't the same.
Yeah.
We don't have a good reason.
But because roughly 20 out of 60 states are used, you're using one third of your possible states in your information system.
So this may seem like a waste, but informatically it's important because it's abundant and it is redundant, right?
So this code degeneracy, you see this in, that's implemented by this translation machinery inside the cell.