The illustration above shows the structure of the Genesis gene. The initiation codon (ATG, in dark blue) is the site where translation begins, i.e., where the protein starts to be built. Before the ATG initiation codon we see an untranslated region (in green) with a promoter sequence (TATT, in purple). After the ATG initiation codon we see an open reading frame (in brown), i.e., codons that do not code for termination. The Genesis gene is completely synthetic and does not exist in nature.