Question

New life form discovered bottom of the ocean. This life form uses 8 new amino acids to build proteins, with also the 20 that are already use. Also, size of their codons appears the same as ours. Which statements could be expected to be true for this life form?

Select one:

a. Protein structure will be less diverse

b. Genetic code will be more redundant so more of the codons code for the same amino acids

c. Must have less nucleotides than we do

d. the genetic code will be less redundant so less codons code for the same amino acid

e. No statements can be expected from this life form

Answer 1

Option D

The genetic code will be less redundant so fewer codons code for the same amino acid.

Currently, there are 64 codons in which 61 codes for 20 amino acids and 3 codons serve as the stop codons. From this, it is very clear that the genetic codes are redundant, which means more than one codon code for a single amino acid. In the current scenario, the newly found organism using 28 amino acids instead of 20, the less redundancy of the genetic code will help to code for the extra amino acids.

Option 1 is wrong because, since the organism using 28 amino acids instead of 20, the protein will be more diverse and if the genetic codes are more redundant as mentioned in option 2, all the amino acids cannot be coded by the available genetic codes since the number of codons coding for a single amino acid is increased. Option 3 is also wrong because this organism has less number of nucleotides than we do, the possible genetic codes will be less and all the amino acids cannot be coded.