It was a key experiment in the development of what is now known as molecular biology and led to a publication entitled "The General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins" and according to the historian of Science Horace Judson is "regarded...as a classic of intellectual clarity, precision and rigour".
[3] This proved that the genetic code uses a codon of three nucleotide bases that corresponds to an amino acid.
[3] In addition to discovering the triplet nature of the codon, this experiment confirmed the non-overlapping structure of the genetic code, identified the presence of "nonsense coding", and revealed the high degree of degeneracy in codon specification.
[4] This demonstration of the triplet nature of the genetic code, although carried out with bacteriophage, later proved to be universally applicable to all forms of life.
Today, scientists have decoded what all 64 codons encode for, and the assignments have proven to be nearly universal.