Significance There are many questions related to the origin of life and how we came to rely on an almost universal system to encode all of life as we know it today. The genetic code is both robust and redundant, yet also full of interesting anomalies. Here we explore one of these anomalies, specifically the existence of two separate boxes/classes of serine codons, AGU/C and UCU/C/A/G. Unlike other synonymous codons encoding an amino acid, these codons for serine require a two-base substitution in order to go from one box to the other and remain a serine. Deciphering how this came to be will provide important insight into the origin of life and the genetic code.
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Inouye et al. (2020) studied this question.
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