The Genetic Code Boolean Lattice

Abstract

The algebraic structures of the genetic code are most important to obtain additional information about the semantic code and its applications. In this paper we define two dual Boolean codon lattices of the genetic code using hydrogen bond numbers and the chemical types of bases: purines and pyrimidines. The Boolean lattices reflect the role of hydrophobicity in the distribution of codon assignments to each amino acid. Particularly, the symmetric images of codons with adenine as second base coding to hydrophilic amino acids are always codons with uracil as second base coding to hydrophobic amino acids as they represented in the Hasse diagrams. The Hamming distance between two codons in the Hasse diagram reflects the different hydrophobicities between their respective coded amino acids. Our experiments have demonstrated a small Hamming distance to the wild type HXB2 of almost all the drug-resistant reported mutations in HIV protease gene. The human beta-globin mutant genes have also exhibited similar results. Our research suggests that the Hamming distance between two genes in the molecular evolution process have a minimal value.