Chirality in a quaternionic representation of the genetic code

A quaternionic representation of the genetic code, previously reported by the authors, is updated in order to incorporate chirality of nucleotide bases and amino acids. The original representation assigns to each nucleotide base a prime integer quaternion of norm 7 and involves a function that associates with each codon, represented by three of these quaternions, another integer quaternion (amino acid type quaternion) in such a way that the essentials of the standard genetic code (particulaty its degeneration) are preserved. To show the advantages of such a quaternionic representation we have, in turn, associated with each amino acid of a given protein, besides of the type quaternion, another real one according to its order along the protein (order quaternion) and have designed an algorithm to go from the primary to the tertiary structure of the protein by using type and order quaternions. In this context, we incorporate chirality in our representation by observing that the set of eight integer quaternions of norm 7 can be partitioned into a pair of subsets of cardinality four each with their elements mutually conjugates and by putting they in correspondence one to one with the two sets of enantiomers (D and L) of the four nucleotide bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil, respectively. Thus, guided by two diagrams proposed for the codes evolution, we define functions that in each case assign a L- (D-) amino acid type integer quaternion to the triplets of D- (L-) bases. The assignation is such that for a given D-amino acid, the associated integer quaternion is the conjugate of that one corresponding to the enantiomer L. The chiral type quaternions obtained for the amino acids are used, together with a common set of order quaternions, to describe the folding of the two classes, L and D, of homochiral proteins.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0465

Representation theory for high-rate multiple-antenna code design

Multiple antennas can greatly increase the data rate and reliability of a wireless communication link in a fading environment, but the practical success of using multiple antennas depends crucially on our ability to design high-rate space-time constellations with low encoding and decoding complexity. It has been shown that full transmitter diversity, where the constellation is a set of unitary matrices whose differences have nonzero determinant, is a desirable property for good performance. We use the powerful theory of fixed-point-free groups and their representations to design high-rate constellations with full diversity. Furthermore, we thereby classify all full-diversity constellations that form a group, for all rates and numbers of transmitter antennas. The group structure makes the constellations especially suitable for differential modulation and low-complexity decoding algorithms. The classification also reveals that the number of different group structures with full diversity is very limited when the number of transmitter antennas is large and odd. We, therefore, also consider extensions of the constellation designs to nongroups. We conclude by showing that many of our designed constellations perform excellently on both simulated and real wireless channels