On the efficiency of the genetic code after frameshift mutations

Statistical and biochemical studies of the standard genetic code (SGC) have found evidence that the impact of mistranslations is minimized in a way that erroneous codes are either synonymous or code for an amino acid with similar polarity as the originally coded amino acid. It could be quantified that the SGC is optimized to protect this specific chemical property as good as possible. In recent work, it has been speculated that the multilevel optimization of the genetic code stands in the wider context of overlapping codes.

…the SGC is not only very efficient in minimizing the consequences of mistranslations, but rather optimized in amino acid polarity conservation for all three effects of code alteration, namely translational errors, point and frameshift mutations. In other words, our result demonstrates that the SGC appears to be much more than just “one in a million”.

…the SGC is most efficient in minimizing the effect of translational errors. It outperforms more than 99.99% of one million randomly generated codes.

the consequent next step will be to take a closer look at biological relevant data and compare how competitive the SGC will be on real data scenarios.