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. 2018 Feb 23;8:3532. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-21973-y

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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A model of communal evolution of the genetic code. (a) A small group of protocells is initialized such that their ‘black box’ primitive translation systems encode random genetic codes consisting of few amino acids. Then the ‘iterative learning’ cycle begins. (b) Two protocells are randomly selected for horizontal transfer of a fragment of the donor’s genetic code to the recipient. (c) A small subset of codon assignments is randomly chosen and transferred; occasionally, codon assignment inaccuracies can occur in the transferred components. (d) The recipient adjusts its genetic code to be more like the donor’s code according to the received assignments. (e) The process of horizontal transfer is completed. Then the cycle starts again by going back to (b).