Generative grammar, proposed and developed by Chomsky in 20th century, aimed to describe human’s possibly genetic faculty of aquiring and using languages. Recent advancements of generative grammer, such as X-bar theory and minimalist program, seem to suggest that the essential portion of the generative grammatical theories might be applicable to other general systems, especially to biosystems. In this paper, phrase-structure-like structure and its possible (grammatical) rules were searched, listed, and analyzed by making comparison with language phrase-structure systems. Head-modifier phrase-like structures were wisdely observed in various biosystems, from molecular level to social and cultural levels. A considerable portion of such systems are very like the phrase structure systems found in the X-bar and/or Minimalist models of the generative grammar in human language systems. Origins of hierarchical societies and therefrom derived upper-leveled bioindividuals (superorganisms) (such as bee-superorganism and multi-cellular animals) or upper-leveled biomachine (such as protein-synthesizing machine) were discussed in detail from the aspects of generalided phrase-structure grammar and active (or autopoietic) evolution. Various phrase-structure-generating biosystems seem to be some kinds of cognitive biomachine, represented by hierarchical learning neural network machine. Accordingly, a possible proposal of "Generalized phrase-structure grammar" or "Generalized generative grammar" would mean that some essential underlying rules must be common to both language systems and other biosystems. Interdisciplinary research problems in these area were discussed.

The influence of 20 common amino acids for the template-directed formation of oligoguanylate (oligo(G)) from guanosine 5’-monophosphorimidazolide (2-MeImpG) on a polycytidylic acid (poly(C)) template (TD reaction) has been inspected for the first time. The yields of oligo(G) were analyzed at 3 and 7 d and it showed less inhibitory activity of the amino acids to the TD reaction while the yields of oligo(G) decreased with His and Tyr. His inhibited the TD reaction, in which 2-MeImpG disappeared rapidly and the formation of oligo(G) was fairly reduced compared with using other amino acids. It was found that the disappearance of 2-MeImpG in the absence of poly(C) was accelerated by His so that the inhibition of the TD reaction with His is due to the acceleration of the hydrolysis of 2-MeImpG. The acceleration of the hydrolysis of 2-MeImpG occurred either in the presence of L-His or D-His, where the hydrolysis of 2-MeImpG was consistent with pseudo-second order process. On the other hand, a mixture of the 20 common amino acids with some transition metal ions showed somewhat strong inhibition to the TD reaction. Based on the results, the relationship of the chemical evolution between nucleic acids and amino acids are going to be discussed.

We have previously proposed a hypothesis on the origin of genes, suggesting that genes generally originated from nonstop frames on antisense strands of GC-rich genes (GC-NSF(a)s) under the universal genetic code [Ikehara, K., et al., Nucl. Acids Res., 24, 4249 (1996)]. To obtain evidence for the hypothesis, simulation of gene evolution was carried out under the six conditions for folding of polypeptide chains into appropriate three-dimensional structures using a Mycobacterium tuberculosis GC-NSF(a) (508 codons) as an ancestor gene. The results showed that the simulation well reproduces both the base compositions at three codon positions and the average amino acid compositions of extant proteins encoded by microbial genomes when a conserved region (200 codons) in simulated proteins was set at about 40%. Contrary to that, the guanine composition at the first codon position and the average amino acid compositions considerably deviated from those of extant genes and proteins when the simulation was carried out using a Borrelia burgdorferi AT-rich gene as an ancestor gene in the presence or the absence of about 40% conserved regions. These results apparently support the GC-NSF(a) hypothesis on the origin of genes which we have proposed.