MOSCOW, May 11. /TASS/. TASS. Dr. Suren Zolyan, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, employee of Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU, Kaliningrad) proposed his own concept of structural-semiotic analysis of the genetic code. According to this concept, the genetic code can be studied as a sign system in which genetic processes and mechanisms get a new interpretation based on similarities and differences with language, the IKBFU press service said Wednesday.
"The genetic code is a product of multistage evolution, and its mechanisms are close to the principles of language organization. The genetic code emerges from matter just as the organic world grew from the inorganic world by introducing new levels of organization. Thus, the links between material objects (in this case, nucleotides and amino acids) led to the emergence of semiotic (sign and semantic) links", the press service quoted Zolyan as saying.
Genes represent a blueprint for the life of an organism, which resembles linear texts written according to certain rules, containing genetic information about biochemical molecular structures and functions. All information in genes is written using four "letters" - nucleotides, which are assembled into "words" three by three - triplets encoding amino acids. Therefore, genes can be considered the informational units of heredity, because their differences consist only in the sequence of symbols. Taking any three letters from the set "A, C, G, T" one can assemble 64 different combinations, however, it is not a random combinatorial system, but a system governed by certain rules, which can be compared with the grammar of natural languages through semiotics, a science which studies general laws of conveying information through signs.
Zolyan presented a concept where the genetic code is interpreted as a language which includes four block components: alphabetical units; vocabulary; grammar (the rules of word formation); and rules of consistency which correlate the vocabulary units and the grammar categories. This approach allows us to see previously unnoticed structural system characteristics of different genetic processes, such as protein synthesis.
Specifically, the distinction between vocabulary (nucleotides) and grammar categories (empty positions within triplets) allows us to identify the rules of forming meaningful units of the genetic code (duplets and triplets) and explain their compositional semantics - rules of correspondence between coding sequences and amino acids. This principle of context dependence will allow to describe cases when biochemically the same nucleotide sequence, depending on its location, acquires a different meaning and performs a different function, and will also help to reveal the individual profile for each of the nucleotides.
The results of the study, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, have been published in a leading semiotic journal Semiotica. Professor Zolyan is also a staff member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan) and the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow).