Tuesday, 22 July 2014

GENETIC STRUCTURE: THROUGH THE LENS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE

INTERPRETING GENETIC STRUCTURE BY DEPLOYING LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE

Abstract

(S)talker issearching the truths of atomic level of biological existence. He is swinging from formalism to non-formalism and vise versa. This project is based on a presumption: triplets in a genetic string behave almost like linguistic structure. The investigators of this projects analogically considered genetic string as a body of linguistic structure. By virtue of potentiality of occurrence in a certain context, a linguistic unit (like phoneme [In case of codons, all the nucleotides A, G, T, C are metaphorically considered as smallest units], Morpheme, lexeme all the triplets/exons are, for the time being metaphorically considered as words], sentence) enters into interdependent syntagmatic relation. Each triplet occurs syntagmatically with each other, e.g., ATG syntagmatically co-occurs with TTT or TGC, i.e., all the 64 triplets have a definite selectional restriction rule and they are subjected to the Projection Principle at the moment of producing innumerable proteins. One may also say that if some triplets are producing same amino acid are said to be in a paradigmatic relationship (one can be substituted by the other). They are metaphorically considered as synonymous. However, there are some crucial questions: in a given syntagm of a genetic string, how the triplets are distributed? Is there any (inter)dependency relationship among triplets? Before going to answer such crucial questions and before going to deploy Chomskian syntactic tools (data is to be fit into the model), we had set our primary task to find out the rank-frequency distribution of triplets. We had deployed a particular statistico-linguistic law, i.e., Zipf’s Law, to understand the rank versus frequency distribution of the codons. What we had found was that the Zipf’sexponent differentiates in case of genetic sequences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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· 2001. (with A. Som, S. Chattopadhyay and J. Chakrabarti) “Codon Distribution in DNA.” Physical Review E. Vol. 63, issue 5, 051908. (pp.051908-1- 051908-8). U.S.A.

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· 2001. (with S. Chattopadhyay, J. Chakrabarti and A. Som) “Identification of Human Proteins Using Linguist’s Tools”. Indian Journal of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Vol. 38, February and April, 2001. (pp. 124-127).

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· 1999. (with S. Chattopadhyay, J. Chakrabarti and A. Som) “Linguistic Approach to Molecular Recognition”. Seminar on Biophysics for moleculer recognition (poster presentation), Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, September 26-29, 19

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