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The polar requirement is an attribute of amino acids that is a major determinant of the structure and function of the proteins, and it plays a role in the flexibility and robustness of the genetic code. The viability of an organism depends on flexibility, which allows the exploration of new functions. However, robustness is necessary to protect the organism from deleterious changes derived from misreading errors and single-point mutations. Compared with random codes, the standard genetic code is one of the most robust against such errors. Here, using analytical and numerical calculations and the set of amino acid-encoding codons, we have proposed some local conditions that are necessary for the optimal robustness of the genetic code, and we explored the association between the local conditions and the robustness. The localness of the proposed conditions and the underlying evolutionary mechanism, which begins with a random code and progresses toward more efficient codes (e.g., the standard code), might be biologically plausible., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Here we study the distribution of randomly generated partitions of the set of amino acid-coding codons. Some results are an application from a previous work, about the Stirling numbers of the second kind and triplet codes, both to the cases of triplet codes having four stop codons, as in mammalian mitochondrial genetic code, and hypothetical doublet codes. Extending previous results, in this work it is found that the most probable number of blocks of synonymous codons, in a genetic code, is similar to the number of amino acids when there are four stop codons, as well as it could be for a primigenious doublet code. Also it is studied the integer partitions associated to patterns of synonymous codons and it is shown, for the canonical code, that the standard deviation inside an integer partition is one of the most probable. We think that, in some early epoch, the genetic code might have had a maximum of the disorder or entropy, independent of the assignment between codons and amino acids, reaching a state similar to "code freeze" proposed by Francis Crick. In later stages, maybe deterministic rules have reassigned codons to amino acids, forming the natural codes, such as the canonical code, but keeping the numerical features describing the set partitions and the integer partitions, like a "fossil numbers"; both kinds of partitions about the set of amino acid-coding codons., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Given a genetic code formed by 64 codons, we calculate the number of partitions of the set of encoding amino acid codons. When there are 0-3 stop codons, the results indicate that the most probable number of partitions is 19 and/or 20. Then, assuming that in the early evolution the genetic code could have had random variations, we suggest that the most probable number of partitions of the set of encoding amino acid codons determined the actual number 20 of standard amino acids., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)