A colorful origin for the genetic code: information theory, statistical mechanics and the emergence of molecular codes

Abstract

The genetic code maps the sixty-four nucleotide triplets (codons) to twenty amino-acids. While the biochemical details of this code were unraveled long ago, its origin is still obscure. We review information-theoretic approaches to the problem of the code's origin and discuss the results of a recent work that treats the code in terms of an evolving, error-prone information channel. Our model - which utilizes the rate-distortion theory of noisy communication channels - suggests that the genetic code originated as a result of the interplay of the three conflicting evolutionary forces: the needs for diverse amino-acids, for error-tolerance and for minimal cost of resources. The description of the code as an information channel allows us to mathematically identify the fitness of the code and locate its emergence at a second-order phase transition when the mapping of codons to amino-acids becomes nonrandom. The noise in the channel brings about an error-graph, in which edges connect codons that are likely to be confused. The emergence of the code is governed by the topology of the error-graph, which determines the lowest modes of the graph-Laplacian and is related to the map coloring problem.