ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Aberrant decoding

Okay kiddo, have you ever played the game telephone with your friends? You whisper a message into your friend's ear, and they whisper it to the next friend, and so on until it gets to the last person. And usually, by the time it gets to the end, the message is different from what you started with, right?

Well, our cells also have a message that they need to send to make proteins, which are like little machines that do different jobs in our body. They do things like help us see, help us breathe, and help us move.

But sometimes, there can be a mistake in the message, kind of like when your friends didn't hear your message right in the game of telephone. When this happens, it's called aberrant decoding.

Aberrant decoding happens when the message - which is made up of something called RNA - gets read wrong. This can be caused by different things, like mutations in our DNA or problems with the machinery that reads the message.

When the message gets read wrong, it can result in the production of a faulty protein, which can cause problems in our body. It's kind of like when you try to build a puzzle, but some of the pieces are missing or don't fit quite right - the whole picture doesn't come together like it should.

So scientists are working hard to understand why aberrant decoding happens and how we can fix it, so that our cells can make the right proteins and keep our body working properly.