Practice question · Numerical answer
A hypothetical genetic code uses 4 bases and codons of length 2. How many distinct codons does it have?
Hints
- Each position can hold any of the 4 bases, independently.
- Compute 4 to the power 2.
Show the answer
16
Why
distinct codons, not enough for 20 amino acids, which is precisely why life uses triplets. Doublets would have forced a smaller amino-acid alphabet.
Practise The Origin of Life and the RNA World
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Biology I is free to start.
More questions on The Origin of Life and the RNA World
- Why does the RNA world hypothesis resolve the chicken-and-egg problem of DNA and protein?
- Place these stages of early molecular evolution in the order the RNA world hypothesis proposes.
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) marks a genealogical bottleneck rather than the inception of…
- Which observations support the idea that RNA preceded DNA and protein?
- The genetic code is essentially the same in bacteria, plants and animals.
- Sort each molecule by the role the RNA world hypothesis assigns it in modern cells.