Carbon--The First Frontier of Information Processing

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dc.creatorPatel, Apoorva
dc.date2001-03-05
dc.date2002-06-10
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T06:01:43Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T06:01:43Z
dc.descriptionInformation is often encoded as an aperiodic chain of building blocks. Modern digital computers use bits as the building blocks, but in general the choice of building blocks depends on the nature of the information to be encoded. What are the optimal building blocks to encode structural information? This can be analysed by substituting the operations of addition and multiplication of conventional arithmetic with translation and rotation. It is argued that at the molecular level, the best component for encoding discretised structural information is carbon. Living organisms discovered this billions of years ago, and used carbon as the back-bone for constructing proteins that function according to their structure. Structural analysis of polypeptide chains shows that an efficient and versatile structural language of 20 building blocks is needed to implement all the tasks carried out by proteins. Properties of amino acids indicate that the present triplet genetic code was preceded by a more primitive one, coding for 10 amino acids using two nucleotide bases.
dc.description(v1) 9 pages, revtex. (v2) 10 pages. Several arguments expanded to make the article self-contained and to increase clarity. Applications pointed out. (v3) 11 pages. Published version. Well-known properties of proteins shifted to an appendix. Reformatted according to journal style
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0103017
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0103017
dc.identifierJournal of Biosciences 27 (2002) 207-218
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/89358
dc.subjectQuantum Physics
dc.subjectCondensed Matter
dc.subjectBiological Physics
dc.subjectBiomolecules
dc.titleCarbon--The First Frontier of Information Processing
dc.typetext

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