Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics (May 2024)
Algebraic and toroidal representation of the genetic code
Abstract
The genetic code is a set of regulatory principles that control the translation of information encoded in messenger RNA (mRNA) into a sequence of amino acids. This study proposes a model starting from the relationships between its physicochemical properties of nucleobase in the codons. We employed a binary metric and the Kronecker product to represent the physicochemical properties of nucleobases in a vector space. This state space has a hierarchical order, with self-similarity and symmetry properties in the hydrogen bonds of triplets. The state space can be mapped under linear transformations to a toroidal geometry with allometric properties. Furthermore, this geometric representation highlights a charge symmetry that exists in amino acids and in the distribution of essential and non-essential amino acids. These results describe a state space between codon-anticodon interactions that can be interpreted as Bell states. This suggests that there is a quantum phenomenon involved in the mechanisms of information storage in DNA. In addition, toroidal geometry can be used to represent the sequences of codons of the mRNA that encode the sequence of amino acids of the proteins to find similarities or homologies between evolutionary related species.
Keywords
