The Dangers of Indels (IMAGE)

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The Dangers of Indels

Caption

The letters in the human genome carry instructions to make proteins, via a three-letter code. Each trio spells out a word, and the words are strung together in a sentence to build a specific protein. Inserting or deleting a letter ('e' in this example) shifts the three-letter code. Known as a frameshift, these mutations cause the remaining words to be misspelled and the protein sentence to become unintelligible.

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J. Jansen/ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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