The Math and Logic Behind Our DNA

The purpose of this paper is not to explain the specific structure of DNA as to how many base pairs per meter, or the distance between base pairs. It is to look at how our DNA came to be, from a mathematical perspective. Math is a lot like magic, in that like Dumbledore said, "Magic...(especially dark magic)...leaves traces." Mathematics also leaves traces.

The first time I noticed that something was wrong (mathematically), was when I was in high school Biology (1969), and the teacher said that life was highly improbable. I asked, "How can life be highly improbable, when you can look out the window and see all those different life forms?" I was told that "life was highly improbable when it first occurred." I took this with a grain of salt (I didn't believe it), and wondered "what makes life a mathematical certainty?"

I had used a reductio ad absurdum argument without knowing what a reductio ad absurdum argument was. The problem with doing something right the first time, without knowing what you did, is that if you find yourself in a si

milar circumstance you may not do it the same way.

A second point I would like to make is that later, when I took Statistics, they stated that the probability after the fact is either 1 or 0. When life first occurred, it was not highly improbable, improbability had gone to 1.

In the summer of 1974, I was trying to transform a yeast cell for it to be able to break down cellulose. I was also taking Introduction to Biochemistry. Had I known when I started that cellulase, the enzyme that breaks down cellulose, requires 8 to 10 additional proteins to create a door, to be able to exit a cell, I would never have tried to transform the yeast.

However, after a number of weeks, the yeast was able to break down cellobiose (the disaccharide that cellulase breaks cellulose into).

It is said that reasoning from a false premise is bad (I don't believe in good and bad). Chemical reactions are supposed to happen in a fraction of a second, and I wondered why it had taken so long to transform the yeast. It wasn't that it took so long to transform the yeast, it was that it took so long to get t

he DNA sequence able to code cellobiase through the cell wall of the yeast cell. From this false premise, I asked, "How does DNA add to DNA?". This question became the question of my Master's degree research (I never got my Master's degree).

One might think that there are only 2 possibilities: that the phosphate sugar bond happens before the hydrogen bonding, or the hydrogen bonding happens before the phosphate sugar bond.

Aside from A then B or B then A, there is also A not B, B not A, A and B at the same time, and not A not B. There can also be combinations of some of these. As it turns out, when DNA adds to DNA, the hydrogen bonding happens first and the phosphate sugar bonding happens second. The thing is, oftentimes DNA molecules add to other DNA molecules just through the hydrogen bonding.

In the fall of 1975 (it took them a year before they begrudgingly approved my question), I was allowed to start the research. You never try to do the impossible, because that would be silly, it's impossible. The first experiment I ran, I did something that was by definition impossible. I wasn't trying to do the impossible, I just wasn't looking at the details as closely as one might. In fact, I wouldn't call this "luck", I would call this "great lab technique". What I did was not make the assumption that you should just grow yeast on sabouraud agar, instead I made up 300ml of all the different agars on the prep room shelf. One of those agars was DNAse agar. It turns out that DNAse agar is a minimal media (no amino acids) and only has the sodium salt of DNA as a nitrogen source. I not only tried growing the yeast I had isolated from nature, but also the auxotroph that was provided by my Microbiology instructor (Dr. Phil Lucido).

The auxotroph should not have grown on the DNAse agar, because the DNAse agar lacked the amino acid required for the yeast cell to produce protein. The auxotroph did grow on DNAse agar, or more accurately, some of

The auxotroph cells grew on the DNAse agar. The cells that did grow produced colonies with 4 or 5 morphologies. If you change the DNA source, you get a different 4 or 5 morphologies, if you change the auxotroph you get a different 4 or 5 morphologies.

- Scott Tackett