Welcome to H3 Maths

Blog Support for Growing Mathematicians

Chewing Gum unlocks DNA and Mathematical Codes

December18

Lola, a young girl who lived in Denmark 5,700 years ago, had blue eyes, dark skin and dark hair. Her last meal included hazelnuts and mallard duck but no milk – she couldn’t stomach dairy. And the reason we know any of this is because she chewed on birch pitch, a material that functioned a bit like an ancient chewing gum. A study of that birch pitch has uncovered the girl’s entire genome and oral microbiome, marking the first time human genetic material has successfully been extracted from something besides human bones. The study published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

How Does this DNA work?

In the 1940’s, the eminent scientist Barbara McClintock damaged parts of the DNA in corn maize. To her amazement, the plants could reconstruct the damaged section. They did so by copying other parts of the DNA strand, then pasting them into the damaged area. This discovery was so radical at the time, hardly anyone believed her reports. (40 years later she won the Nobel Prize for this work.)

And we still wonder: How does a tiny cell possibly know how to do…. that???

Dr. Jean-Claude Perez, a French HIV researcher and computer scientist, has now found part of the answer. Hint:The instructions in DNA are not only linguistic, they’re beautifully mathematical. There is an Evolutionary Matrix that governs the structure of DNA.

Computers use something called a “checksum” to detect data errors. It turns out DNA uses checksums too. But DNA’s checksum is not only able to detect missing data; sometimes it can even calculate what’s missing. Here’s how it works.

In English, the letter E appears 12.7% of the time. The letter Z appears 0.7% of the time. The other letters fall somewhere in between. So it’s possible to detect data errors in English just by counting letters. In DNA, some letters also appear a lot more often (like E in English) and some much less often. But… unlike English, how often each letters appears in DNA is controlled by an exact mathematical formula that is hidden within the genetic code table. When cells replicate, they count the total number of letters in the DNA strand of the daughter cell. If the letter counts don’t match certain exact ratios, the cell knows that an error has been made. So it abandons the operation and kills the new cell.

Failure of this checksum mechanism causes birth defects and cancer.

Dr. Jean-Claude Perez started counting letters in DNA. He discovered that these ratios are highly mathematical and based on “Phi”, the Golden Ratio 1.618. This is a very special number, sort of like Pi.
DNA has four symbols, T, C, A and G. These symbols are grouped into letters made from combinations of 3 symbols, called triplets.  There are 4x4x4=64 possible combinations. So the genetic alphabet has 64 letters. The 64 letters are used to write the instructions that make amino acids and proteins.

Perez somehow figured out that if he arranged the letters in DNA according to a T-C-A-G table, an interesting pattern appeared when he counted the letters. He took single stranded DNA of the human genome, which has 1 billion triplets. He counted the population of each triplet in the DNA and put the total in each slot. When he added up the letters, the ratio of total white letters to black letters was 1:1. And this turned out to not just be roughly true. It was exactly true, to better than one part in one thousand.

OK, so what does all this mean?

  • Copying errors cannot be the source of evolutionary progress, because if that were true, eventually all the letters would be equally probable.
  • This proves that useful evolutionary mutations are not random. Instead, they are controlled by a precise Evolutionary Matrix to within 0.1%
  • When organisms exchange DNA with each other through Horizontal Gene Transfer, the end result still obeys specific mathematical patterns
  • DNA is able to re-create destroyed data by computing checksums in reverse – like calculating the missing contents of a page ripped out of a novel.

No man-made language has this kind of precise mathematical structure. DNA is a tightly woven, highly efficient language that follows extremely specific rules. Its alphabet, grammar and overall structure are ordered by a beautiful set of mathematical functions.
Read the full article here

by posted under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Chewing Gum unlocks DNA and Mathematical Codes    

Comments are closed.

Post Support

Largest number between o and 1 million which does not contain the ‘n’ is 88

 

Rotation SAT Problem: Answer: 4 (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHkTs-Ipfg)

 

Which number has its letters in alphabetical order? Answer: F O R T Y

Hidden Rabbit? Clue: check the trees

How long for the stadium to fill? 45 minutes.

Where are you? the North Pole

Prize Object Puzzle: If Sue does not know where the prize is in the first question, it can’t be under the square. She must have been told it is under another shape. Apply this same logic to Colin. It is then obvious that the prize cannot be under a yellow object. That helps Sue eliminate her yellow shapes. Got the idea?

Algebra Puzzle: Answer = 1

Popular Math Problems Answers: 1, 1

Number of tabs? According to Lifehacker, the ideal number of tabs you should have open is nine. Yes, a single digit. To some, this is like playing a piano and only using a fraction of the notes!

Worst Graph? Where to start. What a visual mess and even some of the lines merge and are impossible to follow. A graph is a visual display of data, with the goal to identify trends or patterns. This is a spider’s web of information which fails to show a clear pattern at all. Solution? Well, different colors would help, or why not group in two or three graphs where trends are similar?

Number of different nets to make a cube is eleven – see this link

Homework Puzzle; The total value of the counters is 486, so halve this to get 243. Now, arrange the counters to equal this amount twice.

The graph on the left (Coronavirus) is for a time period of 30 days, while the one on the right (SARS) is for 8 months! Very poor graphical comparison and hardly relevant, unless it is attempting to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus?

10 x 9 x 8 + (7 + 6) x 5 x 4 x (3 + 2) x 1 = 2020

NCEA Level 2 Algebra Problem. Using the information given, the shaded area = 9, that is:
y(y-8) = 9 –> y.y – 8y – 9 =0
–> (y-9)(y+1) = 0, therefore y = 9 (can’t have a distance of – 1 for the other solution for y)
Using the top and bottom of the rectangle,
x = (y-8)(y+2) = (9-8)(9+2) = 11
but, the left side = (x-4) = 11-4 = 7, but rhs = y+? = 9+?, which is greater than the value of the opp. side??
[I think that the left had side was a mistake and should have read (x+4)?]

Archives

H3 Viewers



Skip to toolbar