Edward Nikolayevich Trifonov (Hebrew: אדוארד טריפונוב, Russian: Эдуapд Тpифoнoв; b.

In his research, he specializes in the recognition of weak signal patterns in biological sequences and is known for his unorthodox scientific methods.

He proposed an abiogenic theory of the origin of life, and molecular evolution from single nucleotides and amino acids to present-day DNA and protein sequences.

After his immigration to Israel, he joined the Department of Polymer Research at The Weizmann Institute of Science as an associate professor.

During that time, he was also a head of the Center for Genome Structure and Evolution at the Institute of Molecular Sciences in Palo Alto, California (1992–1995).

Membership of learned societies Editorial and advisory Boards At the beginning of his scientific career, Trifonov studied characteristics of the DNA with biophysical methods.

[7] Since the beginning of his Israeli scientific period Trifonov has been studying the chromatin structure,[8] investigating how certain segments of the DNA are packed inside the cells in protein-DNA complexes called nucleosomes.

The principle of this winding (and thus the rules determining nucleosome positions), was not known at the beginning of the 1980s, although multiple models had been suggested.

This model was based on the work of Trifonov and Joel Sussman who had shown[11] in 1980 that some of the dinucleotides (nucleotide dimers) are frequently placed in regular (periodical) distances from each other in the chromatin DNA.

[12] Moreover, he suggested that in addition to curvature, each base pairs step could be deformed to different extent being bound to the histone octamer and he called it bending.

[17] Another question closely related to the chromatin structure which Trifonov pursued to answer was the length of the DNA helical repeat (turn) within nucleosomes.

In 1979, Trifonov and Thomas Bettecken estimated[18] the length of a nucleosomal DNA repeat to be 10.33–10.4 bp.

They postulated that structurally diverse closed loops of 25–30 amino acid residues are universal building blocks of protein folds.

Thus the combination of these two facts led them to the idea that the (GCU)n could reflect a pattern of ancient mRNA sequences.

To address this question, they resorted[27]: 108  to three, according to them the most natural, hypotheses: Later on, Trifonov collected even 101 criteria[20]: 123  for the amino acids order.

Trifonov averaged over them and got the proposed temporal order of the amino acids emergence, glycine and alanine being the first two ones.

By an approach close to the Principal component analysis, he derived a consensus definition: "Life is self-reproduction with variations".