A common periodic table of codons and amino acids
Section snippets
Methods and results
The influence of a single nucleotide on the codon was studied by translating homogeneous poly(A), poly(U), poly(G), poly(C) sequences around a single A, U, G, C residue (resulting single permutations of the four single-base codons). The almost universal Standard Genetic Code was used (transl_table=1) [6]. Forty-eight codons produced in this way translate into 18 different amino acids and one stop signal. The remaining two amino acids—Asp (D) and Met (M) are only coded by codons that contain
Discussion
The scientific effort to find a relationship between the nucleotide composition of codons and the biochemical properties of the coded amino acids is as old as the genetic code itself. The distribution of amino acid assignments found within the canonical genetic code is apparently non-random and there is a set of rules relating the nucleotide triplets to the amino acids. Some of these rules are obvious and have been known for a long time, for example, that all codons with a central U are cognate
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