Chemistry Puzzle

Question

Here's a little chemistry themed puzzle I made for a website a year or two back. You don't need to be a chemist or anything - I only took the basics in college

Hint 1 (Probably good to know)

5 Letter Solution

Answer 1

The answer is

CRICK

After Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA and proposed the 3 letter codes seen in this puzzle!

The letters on the left are

Codon Amino acid abbreviations. Taking the equivalent 1 letter abbreviations we get:

R I T Y H
T L R V S
I A S D C
X L Y V S
S C R E X
R

Notice that there are 26 letters here. This could clue an alphabet.

The compounds on the right are

Also amino acids, and are (in order):

Threonine (T)
Tyrosine (Y)
Valine (V)
Threonine (T)
Isoleucine (I)

Now

If we compare these letters to their position in the table, and take the corresponding letter based on the english alphabet, we get a choice of two letters for each amino acid:

C/F
D/R
I/S
C/F
B/K

And so

Taking C, R, I, C and K - we get the final answer 'CRICK', based on the scientist who proposed these codes in the first place!