Class 12 NEET Biology Molecular Basis of Inheritance Questions Part 1

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 t 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.