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tangential: do biologists sometimes use some form of base 64 encoding for their triplets? so instead of AAG.TCA.GGA just g5F or something?

other than the obvious advantage of being shorter, it would also be easier to read: the boundaries would be unambiguous and each char would correspond directly to and amino acid (if applicable/coding)



Proteins are written in standardised IUPAC amino acid codes that carry some semantic meaning, e.g. Alanine: A, Glycine: G etc. Also viral genomes often have overlapping transcription with shifted open reading frames. Biology is not as simple as you think.




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