Solved cryptogram
Your cells copy three billion letters of DNA and proofread the work as they go along.
Biology Facts, sourced to NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cell.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 69 letters over 20 different ones, graded medium.
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What it means
The enzyme that builds a new strand checks the letter it just added and, if the pairing is wrong, backs up and removes it before continuing. That single step improves the accuracy a hundredfold, and a separate repair system sweeps the finished strand afterward for what slipped through. The final rate is roughly one error per billion letters copied. Without the proofreading it would be closer to one in ten thousand, which nothing alive could carry.
The claim comes from NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cell.
- SourceNCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cell
- CollectionBiology Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length69 letters, 20 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
- NCBI Bookshelf: The Cellmedium, 74 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellhard, 76 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellmedium, 71 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: The Cellmedium, 68 letters
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