What are the benefits of start and stop codons?

Question

What are the benefits of start and stop codons?

Answer 1

Well, there's the obvious: to know when to start and stop making a polypeptide chain.  But if you think in a larger picture, this means a cell can make one large mRNA strand that codes for a number of different proteins, and those start and stop codons will enclose the codes for those different areas (instead of making short segments for each separate protein code).  This also means that through the use of the introns and exons (dunno if you got to this part yet), more combinations of proteins can be created by just one segment of DNA.

Answer 2

Try randomly starting in the middle of a word in a sentence and ending randomly in another sentence.   What does it do to the meaning of the sentence?   The start codon indicates where to begin reading the codons for a given polypeptide.  The end codon indicates where to terminate the sequence of a given polypeptide.  The start and stop codons are like the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and the period the ending of the sentence.  The space between the words indicate where one word ends and another begins.