Question

The components that make up the genetic code are common to all organisms. If a segment of a gene contains 27 nucleotides, none of which are stop or starts codons, how many amino acids does this segment code for?

Answer 1

9 amino acids

Step-by-step explanation:

A segment of a gene that has 27 nucleotides will code for 9 amino acids.

Each codon on the gene potentially represents an amino acid and a codon is made up of 3 nucleotides each. Hence, in order to find out the total number of amino acids that a gene segment with 27 nucleotides can code for, the number of nucleotides should be divided by 3.

number of amino acids = number of nucleotides/3

27/3 = 9 codons/amino acids