What is code biology?

Abstract

Various independent discoveries have shown that many organic codes exist in living systems, and this implies that they came into being during the history of life and contributed to that history. The genetic code appeared in a population of primitive systems that has been referred to as the common ancestor, and it has been proposed that three distinct signal processing codes gave origin to the three primary kingdoms of Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya. After the genetic code and the signal processing codes, on the other hand, only the ancestors of the eukaryotes continued to explore the coding space and gave origin to splicing codes, histone code, tubulin code, compartment codes and many others. A first theoretical consequence of this historical fact is the idea that the Eukarya became increasingly more complex because they maintained the potential to bring new organic codes into existence. A second theoretical consequence comes from the fact that the evolution of the individual rules of a code can take an extremely long time, but the origin of a new organic code corresponds to the appearance of a complete set of rules and from a geological point of view this amounts to a sudden event. The great discontinuities of the history of life, in other words, can be explained as the result of the appearance of new codes. A third theoretical consequence comes from the fact that the organic codes have been highly conserved in evolution, which shows that they are the great invariants of life, the sole entities that have gone intact through billions of years while everything else has changed. This tells us that the organic codes are fundamental components of life and their study - the new research field of Code Biology - is destined to become an increasingly relevant part of the life sciences.

Keywords: Cell organization; Common ancestor; Complexity; Eukaryotes; Macroevolution; Organic codes; Prokaryotes.