Expression and antiviral application of exogenous lectin (griffithsin) in sweetpotatoes.

Griffithsin (GRFT) is a highly effective, broad-spectrum, safe, and stable viral inhibitor used to suppress a variety of viruses. However, little information is available on whether GRFT can prevent plant viral diseases. In this study, we constructed a GRFT overexpression vector containing the sweetpotato storage cell signal peptide and generated exogenous GRFT overexpression lines through genetic transformation.

An algebraic hypothesis about the primeval genetic code architecture.

A plausible architecture of an ancient genetic code is derived from an extended base triplet vector space over the Galois field of the extended base alphabet {D,A,C,G,U}, where symbol D represents one or more hypothetical bases with unspecific pairings. We hypothesized that the high degeneration of a primeval genetic code with five bases and the gradual origin and improvement of a primeval DNA repair system could make possible the transition from ancient to modern genetic codes. Our results suggest that the Watson-Crick base pairing G identical with C and A=U and the non-specific base pairing of the hypothetical ancestral base D used to define the sum and product operations are enough features to determine the coding constraints of the primeval and the modern genetic code, as well as, the transition from the former to the latter.

A novel algebraic structure of the genetic code over the galois field of four DNA bases.

A novel algebraic structure of the genetic code is proposed. Here, the principal partitions of the genetic code table were obtained as equivalent classes of quotient spaces of the genetic code vector space over the Galois field of the four DNA bases. The new algebraic structure shows strong connections among algebraic relationships, codon assignment and physicochemical properties of amino acids.

A novel Lie algebra of the genetic code over the Galois field of four DNA bases.

Starting from the four DNA bases order in the Boolean lattice, a novel Lie Algebra of the genetic code is proposed. Here, the main partitions of the genetic code table were obtained as equivalent classes of quotient spaces of the genetic code vector space over the Galois field of the four DNA bases. The new algebraic structure shows strong connections among algebraic relationships, codon assignments and physicochemical properties of amino acids.

Gene algebra from a genetic code algebraic structure.

By considering two important factors involved in the codon-anticodon interactions, the hydrogen bond number and the chemical type of bases, a codon array of the genetic code table as an increasing code scale of interaction energies of amino acids in proteins was obtained. Next, in order to consecutively obtain all codons from the codon AAC, a sum operation has been introduced in the set of codons. The group obtained over the set of codons is isomorphic to the group (Z(64), +) of the integer module 64.

A genetic code Boolean structure. II. The genetic information system as a Boolean information system.

A Boolean structure of the genetic code where Boolean deductions have biological and physicochemical meanings was discussed in a previous paper. Now, from these Boolean deductions we propose to define the value of amino acid information in order to consider the genetic information system as a communication system and to introduce the semantic content of information ignored by the conventional information theory. In this proposal, the value of amino acid information is proportional to the molecular weight of amino acids with a proportional constant of about 1.

A genetic code Boolean structure. I. The meaning of Boolean deductions.

This paper proposes a genetic code Boolean structure derived from hydrogen bond numbers and chemical types of bases, purines and pyrimidines. It shows that in such Boolean structure, deductions comprise physico-chemical meaning. In particular, codons with adenine as a second base coding to hydrophilic amino acids are not deductible from codons with uracil in the same position, which code to hydrophobic amino acids.