Linguists have developed the comparison of the genetic code with language where nucleotides act as letters, and introduced the concept of 'a semiotic nucleotide'—the minimal element that makes it possible to distinguish between codons—coding units of DNA. According to this approach, the biochemical characteristics of DNA operate as informational ones.
has dual characteristics: It contains not only biochemical properties, but it also has a semiotic or semantic dimension. Semiotics is a science that studies general regularities of processing of information through signs. Researchers find analogies between a text and the genetic code, for example, in the fact that genes carry a program of organism development, and that program resembles texts written according to some rules.
Researchers from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University and Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences paid attention to the fact that the same nucleotide in DNA according to its position has a different value in genetic information processing. As a result, in order to understand which amino acid is needed, a ribosome, while reading out each letter, focuses first of all on the"meaning" of its combination within triplets. This is called wobbling, due to the"wobbling" position of the last nucleotide in codons.
The analogy with phonemes enables an explanation of how two distinctive features of a nucleotide correlate with their changeable significance depending on nucleotide's position within a codon.
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