If you want to design an artificial organism with lower mutation rate you can do so. With existing biology most of the space of 3-base pair combinations that equals 64 combinations is mapped to the 20 amino acids. Many amino acids have multiple codings. That means that most amino acids give you a different amino acid.
If you go up to 4 or even 5 base pairs per amino acid and remove duplicate assignments most mutations won’t lead to amino acids and you can add additional repair mechanisms.
The basic theory of coding that we use in computer science to prevent errors in message transmission can be used to reduce DNA mutation in artificial life if we desire to do so.
As an extra you get immunity from all the viruses that need the standard coding.
Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can’t distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there’s nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.
If you want to design an artificial organism with lower mutation rate you can do so. With existing biology most of the space of 3-base pair combinations that equals 64 combinations is mapped to the 20 amino acids. Many amino acids have multiple codings. That means that most amino acids give you a different amino acid.
If you go up to 4 or even 5 base pairs per amino acid and remove duplicate assignments most mutations won’t lead to amino acids and you can add additional repair mechanisms.
The basic theory of coding that we use in computer science to prevent errors in message transmission can be used to reduce DNA mutation in artificial life if we desire to do so.
As an extra you get immunity from all the viruses that need the standard coding.
Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can’t distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there’s nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.