[firefinch]

Congratulations to Leana for being the winner and the first to decode the message. WILL also managed to solve it. As a forfeit, I will do a dare assigned by the winner with a full report on this thread- or another reward as the winner sees fit. I hope it will be interesting!? So now the solution:

...AATACTAATACTAGTACGGAGCACTTAGAAGACTCCTAATTTC...

1. Most people recognised this as part of a single strand of DNA, which contains genes that code for proteins and those proteins determine the traits of an organism. The letters stand for adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine which are molecular units joined in a chain where the specific sequence of letters determines the eventual sequence and structure of expressed proteins.

2. Before a protein can be expressed (i.e. made), the DNA sequence has to be copied into a sequence of RNA which is like a mirror image of the DNA sequence. The rule is that guanine becomes cytosine, cytosine becomes guanine, thymine becomes adenine and adenine becomes uracil.

...UUAUGAUUAUGAUCAUGCCUCGUGAAUCUUCUGAGGAUUAAAG...

3. To make this into a protein a ribosome reads the RNA sequence. Three consecutive letters in the sequence make a codon, and each codon determines which amino acid building block gets incorporated next into a growing protein chain. There are twenty different types of amino acids, and each has a single letter abbreviation. If you started from the beginning of the above sequence you'd get:

...L(Leucine) and then the STOP codon UGA

4. Not very meaningful. There's a catch. Protein expression only begins at the START codon AUG and in this case ends with the STOP codon UAA. Excluding the START and STOP codons, the abbreviated protein chain becomes:

I-M-I-M-P-R-E-S-S-E-D
Isoleucine-Methionine- and so on

I really am impressed with the people who solved this!

-- firefinch