Genes hold the recipe for proteins, which are made of amino acids. DNA only has four letters, or nucleotides, and each sequence of three nucleotide bases, or codon, encodes for one amino acid. There ...

Synonymous mutations have long been ignored in cancer studies since they don’t affect the amino acid sequences of proteins. But research increasingly reveals that they can have disease-driving effects ...

For example, synonymous mutations are generally ignored in the study of disease-causing mutations, but they might be an underappreciated and common mechanism." In the past decade, anecdotal evidence ...