| | |
| | |
Stat |
Members: 3643 Articles: 2'487'895 Articles rated: 2609
28 March 2024 |
|
| | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
Carbon--The First Frontier of Information Processing | Apoorva Patel
; | Date: |
5 Mar 2001 | Journal: | Journal of Biosciences 27 (2002) 207-218 | Subject: | Quantum Physics; Biological Physics; Biomolecules | quant-ph cond-mat physics.bio-ph q-bio.BM | Affiliation: | CTS and SERC, IISc, Bangalore | Abstract: | Information is often encoded as an aperiodic chain of building blocks. Modern digital computers use bits as the building blocks, but in general the choice of building blocks depends on the nature of the information to be encoded. What are the optimal building blocks to encode structural information? This can be analysed by substituting the operations of addition and multiplication of conventional arithmetic with translation and rotation. It is argued that at the molecular level, the best component for encoding discretised structural information is carbon. Living organisms discovered this billions of years ago, and used carbon as the back-bone for constructing proteins that function according to their structure. Structural analysis of polypeptide chains shows that an efficient and versatile structural language of 20 building blocks is needed to implement all the tasks carried out by proteins. Properties of amino acids indicate that the present triplet genetic code was preceded by a more primitive one, coding for 10 amino acids using two nucleotide bases. | Source: | arXiv, quant-ph/0103017 | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
|
| |
|
|
|
| News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:
| |