Question

A new life form is discovered in the depths of the ocean. it is discovered that the new life form uses 6 nitrogenous bases instead of 4, however, the number of amino acids that they use in building their proteins remains the same. Mathematically, what can be predicted regarding their codons?

Select one:
a. They will have more nucleotides per codon
b. their codons will be the same size as ours
c. their proteins will be larger than ours
d. their messager RNAs will be longer than ours
e. Their codons will be shorter than ours

Answer 1

Answer - a. Their codons will be shorter than ours

In normal organisms 4 nucleotides involve in production of 20 amino acids.
So, possibilites are 4^3 = 64 codons.

Here 6 bases are used to produce 20 amino acids
Possibilites are 6^2 = 36 codons is enough for 20 amino acids.

So each codon has 2 nucleotides.