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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2></FONT></DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2></FONT>From <A
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0002F40E-3D61-1056-BD6183414B7F0104">Scientific
American</A>: New discoveries about the rules governing how genes encode
proteins have revealed nature's sophisticated "programming" for protecting life
from catastrophic errors while accelerating evolution. The DNA molecule contains
nothing less than the secret of life, which permits organisms to store
themselves as a set of blueprints and convert this stored information back into
live metabolism. <BR>Only in recent years have new discoveries about the code
revealed just how sophisticated a piece of programming it really is. Why nature
chose these basic rules and why they have survived three billion or so years of
natural selection have started to become clear. We can now show that the code's
rules may actually speed evolution while protecting life from making disastrous
errors in protein synthesis. <BR>When we speak of the "code" and "decoding," we
are being quite literal. Genetic instructions are stored in DNA and RNA, both
made of one type of biochemical molecule, nucleic acid. But organisms are mostly
built from (and by) a very different type of molecule, protein. So although a
gene is traditionally defined as the sequence of nucleotides that describes a
single protein, the genetic sentence containing that description must first be
translated from one system of symbols into an entirely different kind of system,
rather like converting from Morse code to English.</DIV></BODY></HTML>