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The evolutionary transition from uracil to thymine balances the genetic code
Author(s) -
Jonsson Jörgen,
Sandberg Maria,
Wold Svante
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of chemometrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.47
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1099-128X
pISSN - 0886-9383
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-128x(199603)10:2<163::aid-cem415>3.0.co;2-s
Subject(s) - thymine , uracil , cytosine , guanine , dna , nucleic acid , principal component analysis , chemistry , stereochemistry , biochemistry , nucleotide , mathematics , gene , statistics
A multivariate quantitative physicochemical characterization of the five bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T) and uracil (U), followed by principal component analysis, shows that the relative dissimilarities between the bases of DNA (A, C, G and T) are almost the same (i.e. balanced). In contrast, mRNA (containing U instead of T) has a considerably larger relative physicochemical similarity between C and U than between all other pairs of bases and is therefore inherently more unbalanced. These results provide a physicochemical explanation of the presence of thymine instead of uracil as an element of DNA. The principal component scores enable a quantitative description of nucleic acid sequence data to be made for structure‐activity modelling purposes.