[Biojava-l] Reverse translation

[Thomas Down]

Hi...

I've just received a query (by direct mail from someone who's
having trouble subscribing to the list -- I'll look into that)
asking if it's possible to obtain the set of possible codons
which give you a particular amino acid.  It seems to me that
this could be handled quite nicely by making the GeneticCode
translation tables ReversibleTranslationTables, and having
the untranslate method return an ambiguity symbol over
possible codons.  Would anyone have any objetion to me implementing
this?

Of course, if we were to do this, it makes me wonder if we actually
need to differentiate between TranslationTable and 
ReversibleTranslationTable at all.  Possibly we could just
make ReversibleTranslationTable a marker interface to guarantee
that untranslate(AtomicSymbol) will return another AtomicSymbol.
Any thoughts?  Or is it to late to make a change like this?

     Thomas.