Mathematical analysis of codons that stop protein synthesis

Abstract

A mathematical analysis was performed, which shows that the maximum length of DNA in which translation is possible for at least one of three reading frames for any DNA strand is 10 nucleotides. In the case of any nonstandard stop codon triplet, this number can only decrease. Moreover, for any DNA consisting of at most 11 nucleotides, two and more genes overlaps in plus and minus strands are possible. The probability that a stop codon triplet chosen at random belongs to the group of stop codon triplets with these properties is less than 0.06.