How stable is gene-to-protein translation in a relatively identical medium? I.e. if we abstract away all the issues with RNA and somehow neutralize any interfering products from elsewhere, will a gene sequence always produce the same protein, and always produce it, whenever encountered at as specific place? Or is there something deeper where changes to the logic in some other, unrelated part of the DNA could directly affect the way this gene is expressed (i.e. not through their protein interfering with this one)?
Or maybe I don't understand enough to even formulate the right question here. Or perhaps this subject simply hasn't been researched and analyzed enough to give an answer to the above yet?
If the answer is simple, are there any known ratios and reliability rates?
There's no particular hidden question; I'm not asking about designer babies or gengineered foodstuffs or anything like that. I'm academically curious about the fundamentals of DNA and genetic expression (and any comparison between this and programming, which I understand better, would be very nice), but hopelessly out of my depth and under-informed, to the point where I can't even understand research papers or the ones they cite or the ones that those cite, and the only things I understand properly are by-order-of-historical-discovery-style textbooks (like traditional physics textbooks) that teach things that were obsolete long before my parents were born.
The dreaded answer: 'Well, it depends..."
The genetic code - the relationship between base triplets in the reading frame of a messenger RNA and amino acids that come out of the ribosome that RNA gets threaded through – is at least as ancient as the most recent common ancestor of all life and is almost universal. There are living systems that use slightly different codons though – animal and fungal mitochondria, for example, have a varied lot of substitutions, and ciliate microbes have one substitution as well. If you were to move things back and for...
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