Zebrafish
Learning from Fish How other species can teach us about ourselves
Disease
Genetics
The genetic code - the language of genetics
| The 4 nucleotides (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine) are the alphabet of the genetic code, which is the language of the recipe book. Each word in the language of genetics is 3 letters long and is called a codon. A sentence composed of codons spells out the ingredients needed to make a protein. | ||
| A lot of the amino acids used come from the food we eat, whilst others are made in the by our own cells. Those that we can make ourselves are called non-essential amino acids, whilst those we get from our diet are essential amino acids. There are some codons in the genetic code that don’t stand for an amino acid. Instead they’re like the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and the full stop at the end. They’re called the start and stop codons and indeed tell the machinery making the protein to start and stop building. |
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| Copyright University of Sheffield 2011 |
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