How many distinct 55-amino-acid sequences are there?
Recall that there are 64 different 3-letter combinations of nucleotides, but only 20 amino acids.
Furthermore, you know that the first codon in the sequence has to be a start codon, and the last one has to be a stop codon.
So, how many distinct amino acid sequences are there?
So, there are 2.19 × 1099 distinct 165-nucleotide sequences, but only 9.00 × 1068 distinct 53-amino-acid peptides. That’s a big difference, and suggests a lot of repetition in DNA.
On average, how many ways can each 53-peptide sequence be coded?
If you don’t want to do problems like the above, you will need to know how to divide numbers in
scientific notation!