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edyong | January 8, 2009
Living things, from bacteria to humans, depend on a workforce of proteins to carry out essential tasks within their cells. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are strung together according to instructions encoded within that most important of molecules - DNA.
The string of "letters" that make up DNA correspond to chains of amino acids, and they are read in threes, with every combination representing one of many amino acids. Until now, scientists believed that this relationship is unambiguous - within any single genome, every three-letter combination maps to one and only one amino acid.…