What is that word or phrase used to describe how dna transcription and translation is information lossy?
I am not sure of a single word or phrase, but there are two factors that contribute to the inability for us to translate a peptide sequence back into a single nucleic acid sequence: redundancy of amino acid codons and the wobble hypothesis. The redundancy of the codons refers to the fact that multiple codons can code for an amino acid in many cases. There can be one codon for an amino acid, as is the case for methionine, AUG, or several codons, as is the case for leucine, serine and arginine, which each have six codons (here is a codon table: http://algoart.com/aatable.htm). The wobble hypothesis (relaxing the complementation rule of base pairing) refers to the fact that the third base of the anticodon on the tRNA (which carries the amino acid to the growing peptide chain) may not always pair exactly with the corresponding third base on the codon. This allows you to have fewer tRNAs than would be needed if you had to have a
