STANDARD GENETIC-CODE DEGENERACIES FROM MAXIMUM INFORMATION CALCULATIONS

In the known biological codes, which include the standard genetic code and various mitochondrial codes, 20 amino acids along with terminator value(s) are encoded by 64 codons resulting in certain degeneracy patterns for these codes. The present work offers a model based on a generalized information function designed to predict these degeneracy patterns. Previous work using this approach has had some success with the mitochondrial codes, showing the importance of a random component in the determination of the degeneracies. This paper extends the method to the degeneracy pattern of the standard genetic code.