Question

The codon is said to be degenerate, when

• A. the codons degenerate soon after the synthesis of polypeptide chain
• B. one codon can code for more than one amino acid
• C. the codon is non-functional and cannot code for any amino acid
• D. the same amino acid can be coded by more than one codons

Answer 1

Answer: (D)

Codon is said to be degenerate when same amino acid is specified by more than one codons, eg, Alanine is coded by $4$ codons, cysteine by $2$ , leucine by $6$, lysine by $2$ etc.
The other properties of genetic code are
(i) The code is triplet
(ii) Code is non-overlapping
(iii) Code is commaless
(iv) Code is non-ambiguous (particular codon will always code for same amino acid)
(v) Code is universal.