
20 St at ist ics and Data Analysis for Microarrays Using R and Bioconductor
DNA bases, every time a protein is produced a translation has to take place
that would map the recipe written in the 4-letter alphabet of the DNA, to the
necessary protein sequence that uses amino acids from a 20 letter alphabet.
The DNA bases are grouped in triplets , or codons, for the same rea son bits
are grouped in octets, or bytes: if each symbol is limited to only two values (in
the binary alphabe t), or four values (in the DNA alphabet), groups of several
symbols are neede d in order to represent symbols from larger alpha bets such
as the set of 20 amino ac ids (for ...