Paper Finds Functional Reasons For "Redundant" Codons, Fulfilling a Prediction from Intelligent Design

A new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Frontiers in Genetics, "Redundancy of the genetic code enables translational pausing," finds that so-called "redundant" codons may actually serve important functions in the genome. Redundant (also called "degenerate") codons are those triplets of nucleotides that encode the same amino acid. For example, in the genetic code, the codons GGU, GGC, GGA, and GGG all encode the amino acid glycine. While it has been shown (see here) that such redundancy is a...