Adding to our Genetic Alphabet
Sometimes we take for granted how great it is to have a 26 letter alphabet. We even take for granted the fact that words can be as long as we need them to be. There's no character limit on language... except on twitter of course. But imagine for a second if our alphabet contained only 4 letters. It would be a bit harder to communicate right? Now imagine if all your words had to be exactly 3 letters long. There's not many words you could say anymore, 64 to be exact. But that's exactly how the language of our genes works, the language that controls all life on this planet. That's pretty impressive right? and they do it without even using all 64 words, they only really need 21, so most of these 3-letter words are just synonyms. For example, the words GCU, GCC, GCA, and GCG are all ways to say alanine. A codon table: The key to translating our 3-letter genetic words (codons). Image credit: Scott Henry Maxwell ( Wikimedia Commons ) Our current alphabet So ...