What research is currently being done to help treat frameshift mutations?
To understand what a frameshift mutation is, it might help to understand that the genetic instructions that tell the body what to do and how to work are always spelled out in three-letter “words,” or “codons.” For example, here is a (silly) sentence made completely of three-letter words: The cat was too mad for the fat cow. In written languages, we use spaces to mark where each word begins and ends. But in the DNA language of genes, there are no spaces or periods. Each gene “sentence” begins with a three-letter start codon, continues with a long sequence of more three-letter words and ends in a three-letter stop codon. The gene decoding machinery of the cell simply uses this three-letter “reading frame” to know where each word begins and ends. Frameshift mutations occur when one or two letters are mistakenly left out of or inserted into the gene. Imagine our sentence above, but missing the “c” in “cat.” Let’s read it as the genetic machinery in cells would: The atw ast oom adf ort hef
