The information capacity of the genetic code: Is the natural code optimal?

Abstract

We envision the molecular evolution process as an information transfer process and provide a quantitative measure for information preservation in terms of the channel capacity according to the channel coding theorem of Shannon. We calculate Information capacities of DNA on the nucleotide (for non-coding DNA) and the amino acid (for coding DNA) level using various substitution models. We extend our results on coding DNA to a discussion about the optimality of the natural codon-amino acid code. We provide the results of an adaptive search algorithm in the code domain and demonstrate the existence of a large number of genetic codes with higher information capacity. Our results support the hypothesis of an ancient extension from a 2-nucleotide codon to the current 3-nucleotide codon code to encode the various amino acids