Alan Herbert, Scientific Supervisor of the HSE International Laboratory of Bioinformatics, has put forward a new explanation for one of biology's enduring mysteries—the origin of the genetic code. According to his publication in
Biology Letters, the contemporary genetic code may have originated from self-organising molecular complexes known as ‘tinkers.’ The author presents this novel hypothesis based on an analysis of secondary DNA structures using the AlphaFold 3 neural network.