Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-short-options-paper-shared-by-prelims-and-parts-a-and-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2016/s12/2/4/solution

For independent equiprobable bases there are codons, three of them stops, so . In a fixed reading frame, and conditional on starting translation, surviving at least successive non-stop codons has probability . For 300 it is about . Strictly “exceeding 300” requires 301 non-stop codons, giving . A specified start codon, codon bias, correlations or looking for a long sequence anywhere in a large genome changes the sampling problem and cannot be silently folded into this single-frame probability.

New to topics? Read the docs here!