Dredd Blog: Quantum Biology

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Quantum Biology - 6

Dr. Bonnie Bassler (a.k.a. Professor Bassler) of Princeton University once jokingly told us that she sorta though of us as bacteria (How Microbes Communicate In The Tiniest Language).

It was a sort of a kind of reverse teleological statement (Teleological and Teleonomic, a New Analysis).

In honor of Dr. Bassler today I am criticizing those who attribute biological cognition to abiotic cognition (Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 27) a la Roger Penrose ("Finally [Penrose] thinks that the cosmological vision of the Big Bang followed by cosmic inflation is basically wrong and is therefore to be categorized as fantasy." - Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe).

I have prepared some tables of the composition of human chromosomes using GenBank file data (e.g. chromosome 1 here and here).

The appendices show that I made tables of 22 chromosomes (Appendix QB.6.1, Appendix QB.6.2, Appendix QB.6.3, Appendix QB.6.4, Appendix QB.6.5, Appendix QB.6.6, Appendix QB.6.7, Appendix QB.6.8).

Except for the last one, those appendices all have tables of data referring to three human chromosomes.

The last appendix (Appendix QB.6.8) has only one human chromosome, but it also has an E.Coli virus and a T4 virus genome displayed in the same table style.

The majority of people (who have not been given a heads up about the nucleobases, codon, and amino acids) would probably not notice any differences or contradictions in that table data.

Relevant Nucleobases

**Nucleobases**, o known as nitrogenous bases or often simply bases, are nitrogencontaining biological compounds that form nucleosides, which, in turn, are components of nucleotides, with all of these monomers constituting the basicbuilding blocks of nucleic acids. The ability of nucleobases to form base pairs andto stack one upon another leads directly to long-chain helical structures such asribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Five nucleobases—adenine(A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T), and uracil (U)—are called primary orcanonical. They function as the fundamental units of the genetic code, with thebases A, G, C, and T being found in DNA while A, G, C, and U are found in RNA."(Wikipedia).
Nucleotide	Letter	Abbr	Formula
Adenine	A	ADE	C₅H₅N₅
Cytosine	C	CYT	C₄H₅N₃O₁
Guanine	G	GUA	C₅H₅N₅O₁
Thymine	T	THY	C₅H₆N₂O₂
Uracil	U	URA	C₄H₄N₂O₂

These five nucleotides in the table above are what make up the codons related to the amino acids listed in the appendices.

That is the view from "3,000 feet up", but if we look way down deeper it is the molecules (Formula column) that reveal; but better still, at ground-level it is the "C" (carbon), "H" (hydrogen), "N" (nitrogen), and "O" (oxygen) atoms that are the best subjects of interest.

So, the "Total Atoms In Codon" column caught my eye when I got down to ground level.

They caused me to notice that the atom count for some of the amino acids are not the same for every codon associated with that amino acid.

Leucine, for example, has several different codons associated with it (e.g. CUG, UUA, CUU, UUG, CUA ...) which don't add up to the same atomic total even though they are associated with Leucine.

Thus, when they say this or that "codes for" something ("codes for" used here), more research is required to decipher their language.

Closing Comments

The take home from this is that all the talk about "viruses wanted to be more cool so they decided to take over the reproductive systems of microbes, and the replication machinery of abiotic viruses" codes for "Teleological and Teleonomic Analysis".

What you see, if you look closely into the tables, is that the codon atom counts do not equate to the same value:

UUA	Leucine	LEU	L	C₄H₄N₂O₂	C₄H₄N₂O₂	C₅H₅N₅	C₁₃H₁₃N₉O₄
CUG	Leucine	LEU	L	C₄H₅N₃O₁	C₄H₄N₂O₂	C₅H₅N₅O₁	C₁₃H₁₄N₁₀O₄