Observations About A Literary Framework for Thinking About Genetics

I was researching genomes and observed some similarities with literature that I think might better help communicate the topic. Wanted to share them:

• There exists an Alphabet (A, C, G, T and sometimes U). These aren't the most primitive structure, but complex molecules about a dozen atoms long
• Phonons. Codons are 3 letter sets (TAT, AGT, ... )
• Words. A certain number of codons forms something of meaning. Comparing: this way of expression has half the information density of English on a 5-letter word : 26^5 ~= 4^12)
• Reading Order. There is a specific reading order in genetics (from a 5' sugar to 3' one) that is observed in protein synthesis. Reading the wrong way produces meaningless gibberish.
• Punctuation. Promoters and Repressors provide the start and stop to a "sentence".
• Elements of Grammer: exons, introns, promoters, repressors, operator/operon, and conditional operations on repressors give gene sentences surprising complexity. There's a video of a genetic tic-tac-toe that can be programmed using these rules.
• Books / Articles (a typical gene is between a few hundred and five thousand letters long, but some genea can be tens of thousands of letters long)
• Collections / Libraries (genes are organized onto chromosomes)

Conclusions. No conclusions, just found this interesting.

posted about 2 months ago

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James McLellan‭

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