DNA to Protein Translation Tool

Translation turns a nucleotide sequence into a protein by reading it three bases at a time, and the near-universal genetic code maps each of the 64 codons to one of 20 amino acids or a stop signal. The code was deciphered by Nirenberg and Matthaei (1961) and completed over the following years, and its redundancy, where several codons encode the same amino acid, is why silent mutations exist.

Because a sequence can be read starting at three offsets on each of two strands, there are six reading frames. Only one usually carries the real protein, and the tell is a long open reading frame uninterrupted by stop codons. The other five frames are typically riddled with the stop codons TAA, TAG, and TGA. This tool translates all six frames at once and surfaces the longest methionine-to-stop peptide, a fast first estimate of the coding region before you run a database search.

To translate the opposite strand correctly, the reverse frames operate on the reverse complement, which is why an accurate reverse complement is a prerequisite for six-frame translation. You can reconstruct that strand explicitly with the reverse complement tool. Codon usage is also GC-dependent, so the GC content calculator helps interpret why some organisms favour particular synonymous codons.

This browser tool applies NCBI translation table 1, the standard code used for the nuclear genomes of most organisms. Mitochondrial and some microbial genomes use variant codes where, for example, TGA encodes tryptophan rather than a stop, so a predicted protein from a mitochondrial gene should be checked against the correct table. For full analysis of coding sequences, expression, and downstream statistics, the bioinformatics analysis service handles the complete pipeline.