The researchers believe that they can exploit this new physics law and find the probability of mutations before they take place.
A University of Portsmouth research team has found a potential way to predict genetic mutations before they occur.
According to a University of Portsmouth study, a new physics law could allow for the early prediction of genetic mutations.
The study discovers that the second law of information dynamics, or “infodynamics,” behaves differently from the second law of thermodynamics. This finding might have major implications for how genomic research, evolutionary biology, computing, big data, physics, and cosmology develop in the future.
Lead author Dr. Melvin Vopson is from the University’s School of Mathematics and Physics. He states “In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics. One of the most powerful laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy – a measure of disorder in an isolated system – can only increase or stay the same, but it will never decrease.”
This is an undisputed law relating to the arrow of time, which demonstrates that time only moves in one direction. It can only flow in one direction and cannot travel backward.
He explains, “Imagine two transparent glass boxes. In the left side, you have red gas molecules, which you can see, like red smoke. In the right side, you have blue smoke, and in between them is a barrier. If you remove the barrier, the two gases will start mixing and the color will change. There is no process that this system can undergo to separate by itself blue and red again. In other words, you cannot lower the entropy or organize the system to how it was before without energy expense, because the entropy only stays constant or increases over time.”
Dr. Vopson is an information physicist. His research focuses on information systems, which can range from a laptop’s hard drive to the
Dr. Vopson and colleagues analyzed Covid-19 (Sars-CoV-2) genomes and discovered that their information entropy reduced with time: “The best example of something that undergoes a number of mutations in a short space of time is a virus. The pandemic has given us the ideal test sample as Sars-CoV-2 mutated into so many variants and the data available is unbelievable.”
He continues, “The Covid data confirms the second law of infodynamics and the research opens up unlimited possibilities. Imagine looking at a particular genome and judging whether a mutation is beneficial before it happens. This could be game-changing technology which could be used in genetic therapies, the pharmaceutical industry, evolutionary biology, and pandemic research.”
Reference: “Second law of information dynamics” by Melvin M. Vopson and S. Lepadatu, 11 July 2022, AIP Advances.
DOI: 10.1063/5.0100358