Frances
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Member # 169
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posted 03. December 2002 00:06
Stuart Kauffman
quote:
Peter Schuster, in Vienna, U vienna, has done wonderful work on this subject. He made models of RNA sequences that folded, categorized each RNA by the kind of fold it made and showed 1) a power law distribution of the number of sequences that fold into each shape, 2) that the common shapes each form a percolating connected web across sequence space all of whose members are neutral mutants of one another such that one can traverse the entire space stepping only on the same shape. Further he and his colleagues showed that all the common shapes formed such webs, and came very near one another.
I found the reference to Schuster quite interesting and followed the trail.
Molecular Insights into Evolution of Phenotypes
Schuster argues how biological information in the genome arises through mapping from the environment. Schuster's work may help us understand how naturalistic mechanisms can indeed be shown to increase the information in the genome.
If I understand Schuster and the doctoral theses of his students correctly, RNA space shows that there exists many neutral pathways between a small set of structures and many neutral paths connecting.
They mention an example of Schultesd and Bartel who tracked the neutral paths from mutant parent for two RNA structures. Lig-4 to Lig-P and HDV-2 to HDV-p.
Fascinating research which may help us understand how evolution may gotten its head start.
[ 03. December 2002, 00:49: Message edited by: Frances ]
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