An examination of the energetics of Crick's wobble hypothesis

Abstract

In order to account for the observed amino acid coding, Crick postulated the possible existence of certain “wobble configurations” of base-pairs in the third position of the codon-anticodon triplet. Some of these are examined here as follows. The configuration of these pairs is varied and the total interaction energy between the bases calculated by a previously described method. The configuration which corresponds to the minimum energy is selected. All but one configuration are similar to the postulated “wobble configurations” of Crick. The one exception constitutes a redundancy in coding and thus does not affect Crick's postulate. The energies found for these configurations are similar to those previously computed for the usual Watson-Crick pairs, and thus by analogy sufficient to stabilize the “wobble configurations”. An additional result of the computations is to support Nash and Bradley's assertion that the minima of the electrostatic energy and of the total energy occur for very similar configurations.