Genetic Code Compression and Expansion

Proteins, which carry out many of the functions of the cell, are synthesized from genes within the genome. Proteins are polymers of the 20 amino acid and the sequence in which the amino acids are added to the polymer is encoded in sequence of codons in a gene. There are 64 triplet codons (every combination of the 4 DNA bases A,C,G,T), but only 20 amino acids. Most amino acids are encoded by more than one codon. We would like to add amino acids to the genetic code with properties that will help us understand how biology works. To do this we need to compress the number of codons used to encode the normal 20 amino acids to free up some of the code for encoding new amino acids. Our work therefore involves creating genomes with compressed codes and reassigning the free codons to new amino acids.