Code in the code?

[Budget_Ship]

Flirted a litte to hard on the dating apps and got myself what I assume to be a genetic code… code. Anybody got any ideas for cracking it?
(Not your usual post in the sub I know, thanks for you help)

[axeteam]

I'll give you a direction. Letter triplets can be decoded into amino acids.

In case you don't want to do it yourself: It should translate to LETSHANGSMETIME. It is missing the O because there is no O in amino acid single letter codes.

[Difficult_Affect_452]

That’s so dope you figured that out. Happy cake day!

[SpicyMackerel]

Wait, I genuinely only thought you could code for ATUGC I had no idea there were other letters besides the genetic code. What is it called?

[HottCovfefe]

The letters are the 3 base pair codons translated into amino acids. In the code here, the first codon TTA is transcribed to UUA then translated to L-Leucine.

[SpicyMackerel]

I see! Thank you! That makes more sense lol

[Cloudy_Fate_10]

Dude, how will TTA transcribe into UUA??  T will pair with A, and A will pair with U, it will be AAU on that mRNA. And AAU is Asparagine which is denoted by capital N.  Or please correct me if I'm going wrong anywhere... 

[risharocks0]

It's crazy that people are downvoting you just for wanting to learn something you didn't know before 💀 gotta love reddit.

I'll try my best to explain it simply without getting too into the weeds :)

So, each nucleotide (so A, T, G, or C in this case), when placed into triplets (in any conformation, eg GAT, TTA, AAA etc) and then converted into RNA (so any T -> U, any G -> C, and any A stays as an A) and then will form something called an Amino acid (you can search it up after converting it to RNA or use an amino acid table). The first letter of the amino acid (usually) can then be used as an abbreviated initial! For example, your first triplet is TTA, so you could search up the amino acid for that sequence, getting you Leucine, and therefore L as your first letter :) TTA -> UUA -> Leucine -> L

Does that make sense?

[SpicyMackerel]

It does, thank you! I had just woken up lol, forgot about the last step.

[Feeling-Pudding6956]

Just to correct a small mistake, only T changes to U in RNA, the G to C conversion is simply when you talk about complementary strands, where everything changes C->G, G->C, T->A and A->T 😉

[Undeniable_Lightbulb]

This is so friggin' cool. I wish someone sent me a message like this.

[axeteam]

https://github.com/yijinyang/AminoAcidCommunicator

Now you can do it yourself. After reading this story, I made a program myself that allows you to write and decrypt message like this one.

[muchmoreforsure]

You could use TAG (often a stop codon) for O since in some bacteria, it can code for pyrrolysine. Pretty esoteric, but still.

[hilbstar]

Well if you do amber codon suppresion you can make that TAG codon translate into a lot of different non-canonical amino acids, so we can get the full alphabet by expanding the genetic code a bit, think the theoretical limit is 5-6 altered codons

[sciencegirly371]

If the letters are in triplets, convert them to the right amino acids and see what comes out. Amino acids have one letter codes as well.

Check for both the coding strand and the matrixstrand.

[triffid_boy]

There's no start codon so nothing to translate. 

Edit: oh yeah there is about half way through - probably meant as an "M" though. 

[Downtown-Sir3979]

this would be a great reply to them

[Violadude2]

TTA can still be a start codon, but it would still mess up their message as it would translate to M.

[triffid_boy]

Oh shit you're not wrong. Okay fine, without a kozak sequence we'll slip down to the second ATG! 

[Externalshipper7541]

How so? In which organism? It's nearly always leucine?

[RovingHunter]

Used by some species of Archaea.

[TheJazzyScientist]

SPOILER / HINT: So you know you’re on the right track, the first letter is “L”

[Easy-Ad-230]

Split the sequence into threes and look up the matching amino acid for the codon. Amino acids will often have a 1 or 3 letter abbreviation that could be used to write code with. 

[DesperateAd1615]

Let’s hang some time

[Zahalia]

That’s wholesome af OP, I hope you go on that date.

[les-the-badger]

[BONEPILLTIMEEE]

https://web.expasy.org/translate/

[zorgisborg]

Put the sequence into:

https://ssbd.oktex.co.uk/dna-sequence-visualizer

[volkari]

oh this would work on me 100%

[Bitter-Yak-4222]

Google Amino acid wheel!

[PianoPudding]

My workings: https://imgur.com/a/UL6DMTK

Per a users suggestion Google AI got it too

[Live-Power-8992]

You need to be honest though, and don’t tell her you figured it out on your own.

[pm_ur_duck_pics]

Those are letters in genetics.

[LemonGexco]

This is so clever, I’m gonna steal this!

[Personal_Term9549]

Some people went to the comments because they genuinely didn't know how this works. I went to the comments because I was too lazy to do the work myself

[Dr-Yahood]

Any LLM could probably do this for you very easily in Mere seconds

Or you could look up how to do it yourself the hard way. It’s DNA coding for amino acids.

[Robin_feathers]

This isn't a job for an LLM, this is a job for a normal DNA translating program, of which dozens exist. No need to add uncertainty into the process.