Universal Genetic Code

The Genetic code comprises of 64 triplets of nucleotides which are called as the codons. Except few exceptions, each codon encodes for one of the 20 amino acids which produces redundancy in the code that is most of the amino acids are encoded by more than one codon. This is known as the degenerative property of the codon. ATG is the start codon and TAG, TGA, TAA are stop codons usually.

Genetic Code Table

An explanation of why only 20 amino acids Read paper

An explanation of degeneracy in genetic code Read paper