rationalskepticism.org

Just A Theory wrote:
Second, the translation of DNA into proteins is absolutely not algorithmically incompressible due to redundancy in the third nucleotide of virtually every triplet codon. GCT is functionally the same as GCC, in fact there are 64 possible codons and only 20 amino acids plus 3 stop sequences meaning that there is a large amount of redundancy in the genetic code. It is therefore trivially easy to compress the genetic code by removing some of that redundancy.

By measuring the rate of protein production in bacteria, the team discovered that slight genetic alterations could have a dramatic effect. This was true even for seemingly insignificant genetic changes known as "silent mutations," which swap out a single DNA letter without changing the ultimate gene product. To their surprise, the scientists found these changes can slow the protein production process to one-tenth of its normal speed or less.

As described March 28 in the journal Nature, the speed change is caused by information contained in what are known as redundant codons -- small pieces of DNA that form part of the genetic code. They were called "redundant" because they were previously thought to contain duplicative rather than unique instructions.

This new discovery challenges half a century of fundamental assumptions in biology. It may also help speed up the industrial production of proteins, which is crucial for making biofuels and biological drugs used to treat many common diseases, ranging from diabetes to cancer.

"The genetic code has been thought to be redundant, but redundant codons are clearly not identical," said Jonathan Weissman, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the UCSF School of Medicine Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology.

"We didn't understand much about the rules," he added, but the new work suggests nature selects among redundant codons based on genetic speed as well as genetic meaning.