How DNA My Name Works

Step 1 — Letters become amino acids

Each letter in your name is mapped to a one-letter amino acid code. The English alphabet has 26 letters but only 20 standard amino acids, so six letters (B, J, O, U, X, Z) are substituted to the nearest biochemically similar amino acid.

Spaces, numbers, and punctuation are preserved as non-coding positions — they appear as a placeholder dot (•) in the amino acid sequence and are encoded with a fixed codon (AAA, Lysine) in the DNA.

Step 2 — Amino acids become DNA codons

Each amino acid is encoded by one or more three-letter DNA codons — this is the genetic code, one of the most conserved features of all life on Earth. For example, Alanine (A) can be encoded by GCT, GCC, GCA, or GCG.

This redundancy (called codon degeneracy) is why different shuffles of the same name still produce valid DNA: the same amino acid sequence is encoded, just using different synonymous codons.

DNA My Name uses the real genetic code — the same codon table used by textbooks and bioinformatics tools. See the full codon reference table.

Step 3 — Deterministic codon selection

When multiple codons encode the same amino acid, the tool picks one deterministically using a seeded pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). The seed is derived from your name and a variant number using MurmurHash3. This guarantees:

• Reproducibility — the same name always produces the same DNA sequence
• Uniqueness — different names produce different sequences
• Shuffle variety — incrementing the variant number changes the codon choices while keeping the same amino acid sequence

The PRNG is xorshift32, applied per codon position using the formula seed + position_index. This means every name position is independently seeded, preventing patterns from accumulating across the sequence.

What does “Shuffle” do?

Shuffle increments the variant number by 1. This changes the PRNG seed, which changes which synonymous codon is selected for each amino acid — but the amino acid sequence (and therefore the protein identity) stays the same. Think of it as choosing a different dialect to spell out the same biological meaning.

Is my result permanent?

Yes. Because the algorithm is purely deterministic and serverless, the same name and variant will always produce the same DNA sequence — on any device, at any time. There is no database. Share links encode all the information needed to reproduce the exact result.