A Sequence-to-Function Map for Ribozyme-Catalyzed Metabolisms

We introduce a novel genotype-phenotype mapping based on the relation between RNA sequence and its secondary structure for the use in evolutionary studies. Various extensive studies concerning RNA folding in the context of neutral theory yielded insights about properties of the structure space and the mapping itself. We intend to get a better understanding of some of these properties and especially of the evolution of RNA-molecules as well as their effect on the evolution of the entire molecular system. We investigate the constitution of the neutral network and compare our mapping with other artificial approaches using cellular automatons, random boolean networks and others also based on RNA folding. We yield the highest extent, connectivity and evolvability of the underlying neutral network. Further, we successfully apply the mapping in an existing model for the evolution of a ribozyme-catalyzed metabolism.