The study presents a mathematical modeling for supporting the premise that our body is composed of blockchain systems. A cell population is considered a space with peer-to-peer communication networks for applying blockchain protocol. Transaction is defined as gene expression that constantly occurs for protein synthesis in each cell. The transaction process proceeds according to the blockchain protocol with sharing and recording the data on the blockchain ledger. The premise comes from the clues of the previous research such that the cell population is a complex structured network system having cell-to-cell connections. Although individual cells exhibit stochastic nonlinear dynamic behavior, cell population shows consensus behavior that reaches to ensemble through interaction among cells. It is inferred that gene expression is not regulated by the corresponding cell only nor determined by external intelligence such as the brain. This is achieved through a consensus through stochastic interactions between cells over the whole cell population. These findings imply that mathematical blockchain modeling is a suitable for gene expression process. The original contribution of the study is a methodology for applying mathematically the blockchain protocol to the real biological gene expression process. In other words, the DNA sequence is converted into a numeral bit sequence that makes it possible to implement the blockchain protocol. A new DNA sequence scheme is proposed with adding methylated cytosine and adenine as the 5th and 6th bases for including epigenetic information which has profound effect on gene expression and regulation. The methodology was applied to the real biological synthesis process of protein samples. The protein is composed of amino acids that are encoded by triplet codons of 216 kinds with 6 base RNA sequence. The gene expression information is traced backward from a synthesized protein sample, amino acids of codons, RNA transcript up to DNA sequence. One of the results is a numeric value in the form of a bit sequence with which mathematical blockchain modeling is applicable. The cryptographic authentication and the consensus process are mathematically proven to work properly by the blockchain protocol. It implies that the same protein is synthesized, but with different epigenetic data, then protein's latent material properties will certainly be different. Although the result has not been justified by the biologic experiment yet, it is sure that the biological hidden algorithm inside DNA sequence will be revealed by the binary bit-logic with physical on/off states which is mathematically proven. The research will greatly contribute to disease treatment and medicine development as well as epigenetics in the future.
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Subject: Computer Science and Mathematics - Mathematical and Computational Biology
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