Temperature as a determinative factor in the evolution of genetic systems

Summary Heat induces a number of premutational lesions (for example, the deamination of cytosine to uracil) in DNA and RNA. These kinds of errors occur in resting as well as replicating polynucleotides. However, an increase in temperature also raises the probability of copying error occurring in nucleic acids because of increased thermal noise in the replicative machinery. In most modern genetic systems, the majority of heat-induced lesions are efficiently repaired. It follows that the importance of heat-induced error increases as the effectiveness of repair declines. We show in this paper that the error rate of enzymatic polynucleotide copying is expected to increase monotonically with temperature. We also explore the effects of temperature variations on the early evolution of biological information transmission mechanisms.