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Q. Degeneration of a genetic code is attributed to the

AIPMTAIPMT 2003Molecular Basis of Inheritance

Solution:

In a triplet for a particular amino acid more than one word (synonyms) can be used. This phenomenon is described by saying that the code is degenerate. A degenerate code would be one where there is one to one relation between aminoacids and the codons that 44 codons out of 64 will be useless or nonsense codons. A code is degenerate because of the third base of the codon. It has been shown that the same /RNA can recognize more than one codons differing only at the third position. For example GCU, GCC and GCA all code for alanine amino acids.