The genetic code employs three stop codons – UGA, UAA, and UAG. We have already seen that these codons are perfectly immune to the effects of cytosine deamination. In other words, the code buffers against mutations that will mistakenly produce elongated proteins by turning a stop codon into a sense codon (a codon that codes for an amino acid). But another question arises – why are there three stop codons? Since one stop codon would be sufficient for the purposes of signaling termination durin