Question

If a bacteria has 6 nucleotides. How it will affect the genetic code and will it still have Wobble position?. Thank you for reading and helping me if you can !.

Answer 1

If a bacterium has 6 nucleotides instead of universally found 4 nucleotides, the first thing it will do is to make more number of codons. We know that codons are the combination of 3 nucleotide sequence that codes for an amino acid and with 4 nucleotides a bacterium can have 4^3 = 64 codons. So, if a bacterium has 6 nuceotides, it wiil be able to make 6^3 = 216 codons.

We also know that bacteria make 20 amino acids out of these 64 combinations, and these 20 amino acids are used in different combinations and sequences to code for various different proteins in the bacteria. Therefore, by that rule we can expect bacteria to make 216 – 44 = 172 amino acids, and far bigger number of proteins than it makes with 20 amino acids normally.

Wobble position is there at the third position in a codon due to the non availability of enough number of different tRNAs to transcribe from all 64 mRNAs and there are only 20 amino acids which can be encoded by 64 codon combinations. Therefore, by this understanding we can expect the wobble position to be there in a bacterium with 6 nucleotides also, this is because we expect this bacterium to have same number of tRNA molecules to transcribe from all available combinations of mRNA and make a maximum of 172 amino acids out of available 216 codon combinations.

Thanks!