Michael Gilchrist, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is using the power of supercomputers at the National Institute of Computational Sciences (NICS) to help advance our quantitative understanding of the costs and errors associated with protein translation. He and his team are looking closely at gene expression and plotting it on a graph in an effort to see which codons are favored by mutation bias, or random changes in the sequence of nucleotides; or by natural selection, a key, non-random mechanism of evolution in which one synonymous codon is favored over another. A codon is sequence of three nucleotides which together form a unit of genetic code in a DNA or RNA molecule. For the complete article, visit NICS website.