Bioinformatics/Sequence Data/Central Dogma

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search

The Central Dogma states that DNA is transcribed into RNA and that RNA is then translated into proteins. DNA is composed of nucleotides (guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine). Sets of three nucleotides in a string of DNA are called codons. The twenty amino acids are specified by these codons. The three codon code is often referred to as degenerate since in most cases there is more than a single codon for each amino acid. In addition to codons specifying the amino acids there are also stop and start codons which signal the beginning and end of a protein coding sequence.