Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
No, each nucleotide would still pair with one other—there would just be an additional possible purine/pyrimidine pair (i.e., A:T + G:C + X:Y).
As for transcription errors, you’d only have 36 potential codons (62) instead of 64 (43), so it seems like the process could be more robust.
Oh, I misunderstood. Yeah, in that case there isn’t such an increase in risk of transcription errors. I think it’s still increased slightly, because each nucleotide could become one of five others instead of one of three others, so it might still be easier for a stray high-energy particle to cause a conversion. Depends on how they’re formed.
But, I’m not any kind of biologist.
Translation errors seem like biggest problem, with the current system you have some amount of redundancy where sometimes a single point mutation still gives the same codon but you would lose that with less base pairs per codon