November 6, 2009
Another stunnig article from Mike GENE.. He hunts ”the Duck” again..
Back around 2002, I noted that the genetic code appears to funnel one of the most common base pair substitutions, the C-to-T transitions caused by deamination of the cytosine. Put simply, codons containing a C specified a wide range of amino acids, but when that C is converted to T, the new set of codons all converge on the most hydrophobic amino acids. The original analysis is found here.
To see this for yourself, the figure below represents a hydrophobicity scale for the 20 amino acids based on 47 published attempts to quantify hydrophobicity:
Now consider the effect of cytosine deamination using this scale:
Scale on left are the amino acids coded for by C-containing codons which is converted to scale on right by the deamination of those cytosines.
Posted by evolutionoriented 