New Physics Law Could Predict Probability of Genetic Mutations

Researchers in the United Kingdom say a new law of physics—dubbed the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics—could be used to predict genetic mutations.

According to the work, which was published recently in the journal AIP Advances, also details how the law behaves differently to the second law of thermodynamics, and that the discovery could have massive implications for future developments in genome research, evolutionary biology, computing, big data, physics, and cosmology.

“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,” says lead author Dr. Melvin Vopson an information physicist from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Mathematics and 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 linked to the arrow of time, which shows that time only goes in a single direction and can’t go backwards. Vopson uses a metaphor of a red gas and a blue gas that are allowed to mix into one gas of a different color inside a chamber—there is no process than can separate them back into blue and red. “[Y]ou 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,” he adds.

Vopson hypothesized that, if the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy needs to stay constant or increase over time, then perhaps information entropy would be the same. But what he and collaborator Serban Lepadatu from the University of Central Lancashire found was the exact opposite. “[I]t decreases over time. The second law of information dynamics works exactly in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics,” Vopson says.

He claims this is what drives genetic mutations in biological organisms.  “The worldwide consensus is that mutations take place at random and then natural selection dictates whether the mutation is good or bad for an organism,” Vopson says. “If the mutation is beneficial for an organism, it will be kept. But what if there is a hidden process that drives these mutations? Every time we see something we don’t understand, we describe it as ‘random’ or ‘chaotic’ or ‘paranormal’, but it’s only our inability to explain it.  If we can start looking at genetic mutations from a deterministic point of view, we can exploit this new physics law to predict mutations—or the probability of mutations—before they take place.”

To test the theory, Dr. Vopson and colleagues analyzed COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) genomes and found that their information entropy decreased over 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,” Vopson says. “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.”