A common periodic table of codons and amino acids

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Abstract

A periodic table of codons has been designed where the codons are in regular locations. The table has four fields (16 places in each) one with each of the four nucleotides (A, U, G, C) in the central codon position. Thus, AAA (lysine), UUU (phenylalanine), GGG (glycine), and CCC (proline) were placed into the corners of the fields as the main codons (and amino acids) of the fields. They were connected to each other by six axes. The resulting nucleic acid periodic table showed perfect axial symmetry for codons. The corresponding amino acid table also displaced periodicity regarding the biochemical properties (charge and hydropathy) of the 20 amino acids and the position of the stop signals. The table emphasizes the importance of the central nucleotide in the codons and predicts that purines control the charge while pyrimidines determine the polarity of the amino acids. This prediction was experimentally tested.

Section snippets

Methods and results

The influence of a single nucleotide on the codon was studied by translating homogeneous poly(A), poly(U), poly(G), poly(C) sequences around a single A, U, G, C residue (resulting single permutations of the four single-base codons). The almost universal Standard Genetic Code was used (transl_table=1) [6]. Forty-eight codons produced in this way translate into 18 different amino acids and one stop signal. The remaining two amino acids—Asp (D) and Met (M) are only coded by codons that contain

Discussion

The scientific effort to find a relationship between the nucleotide composition of codons and the biochemical properties of the coded amino acids is as old as the genetic code itself. The distribution of amino acid assignments found within the canonical genetic code is apparently non-random and there is a set of rules relating the nucleotide triplets to the amino acids. Some of these rules are obvious and have been known for a long time, for example, that all codons with a central U are cognate

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