A Possible Mechanism for the Initial Transfer of the Genetic Code from Deoxyribonucleic Acid to Ribonucleic Acid

Abstract

IT is now a generally accepted hypothesis that deoxyribonucleic acid contains the genetic information in the living cell which ultimately directs the formation of protein. Moreover, there is some evidence that deoxyribonucleic acid acts as a template for the formation of ribonucleic acid which relays information to the protein polypeptide chain by another template mechanism. If this were so there should be a simple relation between the composition of ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids, since there are only four commonly occurring base groups in each nucleic acid. The fact that this is not so is probably due to two factors: only a fraction of the nucleic acid in the cell functions as a template and, therefore, only this fraction would be pertinent when comparing base ratios of the two nucleic acids; there are several different templates (more than two) involved in the transfer of information from deoxyribonucleic acid to the polypeptide chain, and, as a result the general problem of information transfer might be more easily solved by consideration of each template and its immediate chemical product.