What is the connection between film scripts, television screens and genetic code? What happens in the absence of a visual cipher? And what can be learned from this?
Dr. Zvi Telusti. like in the movie
This story can be started, if you want, from the opening image in the movie "Twin Peaks" by David Lynch. A black-and-white TV screen flickers endlessly, blinding, painful, disturbing the viewer. Thus, after a few seconds, the ax placed on the television and smashes it to pieces, accompanied by a resounding cry of horror, is received with relief. Anything is better than the rough and meaningless jitter. The brain prefers visual patterns with clear outlines that can be deciphered and identified.
The transition between a flickering screen and a sharp image may also be a script or a model describing the birth of molecular codes such as the genetic code. An image on the TV screen is actually a cipher: it is built as a matching table between the coordinates of the pixel on the screen, and the color radiating from the pixel. The genetic code is also a correspondence table between triplets of DNA bases (codons) and the 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. In other words, the genetic code is a kind of translation table between
Two molecular languages: the language of DNA and the language of proteins. If we return to the flickering TV screen, we immediately see that the thing that bothers us is the absence of a visual cipher: the matching table that creates the flickering image on the screen is completely random and constantly changing.
There is no correlation between the location of the pixel and its color, so the table cannot be used to translate between the location language and the color language. A cipher was born at the exact moment when such an adapter appears, and together with it the possibility of translating from language to language was born.
"In that case," says Dr. Zvi Telusti from the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science, "it is possible to write a script, or a mathematical model, that would describe the birth of the genetic code, from a meaningless image or situation such as the flickering screen that appears in the first scene of Twin Peaks'. In the first picture, or in the initial state of our model/script, there is no correlation between the DNA codons and the amino acids. Such a situation represents an ancient world where proteins are created randomly, and in a random composition,
regardless of the genetic code". What causes the appearance of the genetic code (or the appearance of a sharp and clear image on the TV screen)? Dr. Telusti says that in order for such a transition to take place, it must bring with it considerable benefits to the organism, for a "price" that is not too high. The advantage of the code is clear: with it, the organism will be able to store programs in its genome
To produce sophisticated proteins, and to implement them at the time and place where he needs proteins. The price of the cipher is no less clear: the necessity to produce molecular "machines" that can translate with the required precision from one molecular language to another. The economic "return curve" between the advantage and the price determines that a cipher will be born exactly
At the meeting point and the balance between advantage and price.
Dr. Telesti mathematically examined this balance of forces, and discovered that the birth of a cipher (such as an image on the television screen, a genetic cipher or any other molecular cipher) is not much different from a transition-manifestation in the material world, such as a transition between states of aggregation (for example, a transition of a substance from liquid to gas state). From this analogy, it follows that the young code will be "smooth", that is, two similar codons will sometimes be translated into the same amino acid or an amino acid that is similar to it in its chemical properties. A code will appear on the TV screen
Part in that neighboring pixels will be similar in color. The brain and molecular codes prefer such images, created by a fairly smooth cipher.
In the last and decisive act in the "script" written by Dr. Telusti, it becomes clear that the image of the cipher revealed to our eyes during the passage of a show is related to the mathematical problem known as the "Four Colors Problem". To solve the color problem, you need to find the "coloring number", the minimum number of colors that will be enough to color any geographical map so that neighboring countries are different colors. If the map is drawn on a sphere, the coloring number is four (hence the name of the problem). But if the map is drawn on a torus (bagel), a surface that has one hole, at least seven colors are needed. That is, the number of coloring depends on the number of holes in the surface. To draw the map of the genetic code you need a surface with many more holes, between 25 and 41. The number of holes is derived from the language in which the cipher was written, triplets of letters from a four-letter alphabet (the bases A, T, G, C). From the mathematical model it appears that the number of amino acids that will appear in a smooth genetic code is limited by the number of coloring. On the multi-holed surface of the genetic code the number of coloring is 25-20, that is, very close to the number of amino acids in the real world. This "script" on the birth of the genetic code, and the resulting mathematical model, which describes laws for the processes of formation or birth of molecular codes in general, were recently described in articles published by Dr. Telusti in the scientific journals Journal of Theoretical Biology, Physical Review Letters, and Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra
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One response
If we take it one step further, through the mathematical model it is also possible to create thousands of virtual worlds that would represent a possible reality if the picture were sharpened in a different way and not as the situation we are familiar with! Because if we go back to the example of the television series Twin Peaks .. the blurry picture could have sharpened into thousands of other pictures! Or maybe because there are already outlines it is reduced to dozens of different pictures!