what is the purpose of having multiple codons
Codon usage bias There are 64 different codons (61 codons encoding for amino acids plus 3 stop codons) but only 20 different translated amino acids. The overabundance in the number of codons allows many amino acids to be encoded by more than one codon. Because of such redundancy it is said that the genetic code is degenerate. The genetic codes of different organisms are often biased towards using one of the several codons that encode the same amino acid over the othersâ€”that is, a greater frequency of one will be found than expected by chance. How such biases arise is a much debated area of molecular evolution. Codon usage tables detailing genomic codon usage bias for most organisms in GenBank and RefSeq can be found in the HIVE-Codon Usage Table database.[1]
Character (computing) Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of digits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. While most character encodings map characters to numbers and/or bit sequences, Morse code instead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length.