DNA Mechanics(Science + Future game)

Since I didn’t find any similar topic on the site, I’d like to ask a rather unusual question about the microbial stage. I’m talking about things like triplets, RNA and amino acids. Will in general life in the game be chemically the same as life on Earth, or not? It would seem that where you can enter this topic, but I have thoughts on this. What I’m talking about?
I hope it’s no secret to anyone that DNA itself, if abstracted from RNA and other participants in transcription, does not carry any information and is simply a random sequence of nucleotides. If we also add RNA and enzymes involved in the transcription process to this system, DNA immediately acquires a meaning that is not actually encoded by the laws of the universe. Each triplet in DNA is actually just a triplet, and the only thing that really carries information about the correspondence between a triplet and an amino acid is RNA molecules, primarily tRNA and rRNA, it depends on their structure which amino acid is encoded by a particular triplet.
I tried to simplify the explanation as much as possible in order to get the point across - in organisms from another planet, which at the same time work at the expense of the same amino acids (conditions, I know), the genetic apparatus may well be radically different from ours, for example, some amino acid on Earth encodes one triplet, and on the player’s planet it’s different, which already makes the genomes of organisms from these two planets absolutely incompatible, even if the final sequence is the same (for example, there is a person with the usual terrestrial genetic code, and there is a person who is identical in all respects, even in the order of coded amino acids, but with a different coding method, and in fact they will be absolutely genetically incompatible, and they will not have the same children), thus, with advanced genetic engineering, some species will face the question of interplanetary crossing, and between which It will be possible with some planets, but not between some, which, in principle, can also form relationships between the planets. Or, for example, use the features of protein coding for planetary classification. And yes, if I’m wrong somewhere, correct me, my ability to think is affected by the 30-degree heat, which began very suddenly (it could snow at the beginning of summer)

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I think I hit the wrong topic

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Changed it for ya

Thank you, The heat is really terrible, my head stops working

From a brief glance at your post it seems this is probably relevant:

In my head, this mechanic would work like this:
When creating a planet, a three-dimensional table is created, where various nitrogenous bases act as parameters, in fact, the intersection of three bases is a specific triplet, and a certain amino acid is randomly assigned to each, thus creating, one might say, a genome programming language, while nucleotides are analogous to binary code. This table can be viewed in some debug menu, I don’t know, but, in any case, its main function rather works at the stage of space exploration, when organisms from other planets are discovered and the question of interplanetary hybridization arises. Plus, some aspects of the gameplay, for example, xs, features of metabolism or osmotic balance, in principle, may depend on this. In general, I only understand that it should be something like a 3D table, and that it rather pops up at the space stage, when organisms from different planets meet. But, in general, it would be interesting to have organisms on the same planet with different “programming languages” of DNA, which would indicate that everything on the planet has either one ancestor or another, and there were actually two first cellular organisms, and they are also completely incompatible. And then, having discovered the mechanism of “reading the genome” and acquiring a “programming language” for the DNA of animals from a certain planet, it would be possible to bypass the barrier of hybridization, or even create an exact copy of the organism, but with a different language, how to convert its DNA, and then create hybrid

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There are 3 codons (64 combinations) coding for 20 amino acids (plus the start and stop codons).

The probability for another life to use the same codon to amino acid type as we do is 1/(64!/((6!^2)(4!^6)(3!^2)(2!^10))) so 1 over 3,47*10^71. I don’t think any two life (of the kind we know of) will have compatible DNA’s, so the game doesn’t have to keep track of its DNA. Storing the planet of origin would have the same effect [1].

On a similar note, it would be beneficial to keep count of the chirality (edit: apparently this has been talked about. forgive me for not doing my reading) On earth, we have left handed amino acids and right handed sugars. The mirror imaged parts of these should have pretty much the same properties (other than compatability issues with our ones). So if you were to visit an alien planet with the same chirality types, you can forage from the local wildlife. It could still have toxic effects, but it can at least be processed into something edible. If the chirality doesn’t match, it would have no use other than biotechnology.

By the way, if one were to transliterate his genetic code to another system as you said, he would gain immunity to viruses adapted to his previous system. (If reverse chirality, immune to bacterial infections too) That could have applications.


  1. When life first appeares, it would spread to all over its planet, preventing another kind of life appearing again. The only way for two different kinds to coexist is if one arrived with meteorites from somewhere else. ↩︎

That doesn’t control for totally separate ecosystems, like the shadow biosphere theory or a tidally locked world where one half has ammonia oceans and the other water, but yes, in carbon based lifeforms on ordinary planets you aren’t wrong.

also remember we only use 20 amino acids and four nucleotide, and that you dont necessarily need the 3 base pairs to an amino acid, and that different compound balances or enzymes might result in proteins folding oddly, or the DNA mRNA tRNA cycle could be different, or the lifeforms could have something weird and small like gut bacteria that kill the other one.

On that note:

Old post in another thread

So yeah genetics isn’t the only issue
However…

Retcon that to also include custom genetics or picking one

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Here, as with abiogenesis, no matter how small the probability is, if it is not equal to zero, it must happen sooner or later
As for the fact that there will not necessarily be a triplet system, this is understandable, but there is such a problem as optimization, and reducing everything to triplets, it seems to me, is the only way not to destroy computers)

i actually have a solution for this one that isn’t just playing god to make a pseudohybrid.

step 1: have the chitin and leg things only develop after the organism is born and the foldy bits only develop before it is born so neither get in eachother’s way via hormones produced before and after being born

step 2: make sure the insect part doesn’t get flipped through some r/black magic belgiumery by swapping out whatever gene is responsible for that with the gene that prevents that in mammals

step 3: use trial and error to keep the digestive systems from interfering with eachother’s development

step 4: make sure your genetic abomination has a working brain and doesn’t have its blood leaking out of its spiracles

step 5: test its vision to make sure your abomination has better eyes than a rhinoceros

step 6: wonder why you decided to not combine the genes of the mammal and the insect and instead just bound an insect cell and a mammal cell together

step 7: test to make sure it has muscles in all its limbs and do the same for the hydraulic systems

step 8: try to find where it went because it broke out of its terrarium/ tank because of you combining biohydraulics and actually strong muscles creating an unholy amount of power in one organism that would still not survive in the wild

step 8.5: find it on the floor struggling to move because its muscles are not evenly spread enough for them to be remotely useful for standing up without bones which it decided to not develop yet

step 9: use a haploid diaspore made from the same organisms as your abomination to test its ability to reproduce and see if it lays eggs or lays developed children

step 9: start from scratch because it just made an unholy abomination of one side foldy and the other side leaking blood out of its spiracles and its legs getting obstructed by foldiness but actually make it one genome that does not require going through extreme efforts to make this time

step 10: repeat step one but make it start from one cell this time

step 11: have the entire organism or none of the organism get flipped during fetal development

step 12: make the digestive system develop through foldy bits first(during the time in egg) and through leggy bits afterwards

step 13: make sure the whole body gets coated in foldy bits in the in-the-egg fetal development stage and that the entire body gets coated in leggy bits in the out-of-the-egg fetal development stage or this experiment will result in failure to reproduce

step 14: make sure the spiracles are not leaking blood as if they are they will get clogged, if the spiracles are leaking blood disconnect them from the blood vessels and make sure they only interact with the blood through a vascularized membrane(kinda similar to how your alveoli work but not really), if not find what other organ system they are interfering with and fix it.

step 15: make sure the hydraulics don’t shatter the bones(you made sure those are in there, right?) and that the muscles can work alongside them so it can hunt prey far better than the 3% success rate of wolves assuming it actually has the ability to move

step 16: make sure it can walk on all 4-10,000 legs without much of a problem(it doesn’t matter which set of legs it prefers just that all of them work) and that it has a functioning jaw as well as functioning mandibles

step 17: make sure it does not have compound mammalian eyes. the structures of compound eyes and mammalian eyes DO NOT MIX. they do not allow for focusing light properly and they will leave the experiment unable to make sense of its vision. make sure the mammalian eyes are separate from the compound eyes and covered in a clear chitin layer to prevent drying out and remove the need for tears for the purpose of eye hydration but allow the tear ducts to reach the outside of the chitin. it is best to make sure the eye chitin can change color to block out light when the experiment wants to sleep and remove any and all eyelids as they no longer serve a purpose

step 18: make sure the brain can control all the limbs and if the experiment cannot learn how to anything replace the genes for the neurons with genes that code for human neurons and if that fails make it only use the brain structure of the mammal

step 19: see if the experiment would survive outside of the lab, if it can’t fix that.

step 20: make 1,000,000s of the experiment and release them into a habitat of your choosing while avoiding inbreeding among the species you have created from two species that have the most recent common ancestor of a lifeform from during or before the Cambrian era

I suppose the chimera in question isn’t a xenobot, it can reproduce and it has a like an embrionic development, its just that the development is artificially designed.

You can mutate a hox gene of a mosquito and make its legs grow on its head*. I guess you can make a totally alien organ develop too.


I think a chimera could survive a generation, but it wouldn’t survive evolution. Because there are incompatabilites, codon or more fundamental incompatabilities in the case of alien chimeras, and molecular (for example, can you get a blood donation from a horseshoe crab?) and biomechatronic incompatabilities in the case of a chimera between two species in the same planet.

They would be outcompeted by a species that doesn’t have translators and redundant systems.

I wonder how this is related to the topic of the post?? It’s about genetics and about the fact that different triplets can correspond to the same amino acids, and what about the development of the legs, intestines and brain, which are already quite easy to do by stretching and growing certain areas, followed by cell differentiation in the right structures?