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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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Emergence of artificial genetic codes. Results are averaged from 50 runs and plotted in intervals of 500 transfers. Expressivity counts the receiver’s encoded amino acids after a transfer (range [1, 20]), plotted as a box plot where the dark green bar represents the overall mean, the lighter green bar represents lower and upper quartiles, dotted lines represent minimum and maximum non-outliers, and circles represent outliers. Δ_code represents optimality as the code’s robustness to single nucleotide changes (red box plot). The standard genetic code (SGC) has an expressivity of 20, the number of amino acids encoded in the code. The Δ_code of SGC’s codons (excluding stop codons) is 5.24 (red line). The most robust artificial code with the same expressivity as the SGC has a Δ_code of 4.17 (see Fig. 1b for details). Universality is measured as the average distance between all codes in a group of protocells, where distance is calculated as the number of different codon assignments (range [0, 64]). We plot the overall mean distance and its standard deviation, with the final average of 16.86 different assignments being the smallest overall average encountered for the duration of these runs.