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How to translate your DNA sequence into a protein sequence

See also What is Translation?

1. Enter your DNA sequence into the text box and click the button "Add". Your new entry is added.
   
   You can enter all sequences you need to convert at this point. If you don't have any sequences and just want to try it out, you can import some example sequences by clicking on "Load Examples", next to the "Add"-Button.
   For more details regarding data entry and acceptable formats see Help>Sequence Import
2. Select all your entries that you want to convert by clicking on them. Selected entries change the background color.
   
   To deselect an entry, click on it again; the background changes to white again. You can select multiple entries to convert them all at once.
   For more details about selecting entries see Help>Selecting entries
   Help>Renaming entries describes how to change an entry name.
3. After selecting the entries, choose the appropriate command in the tool bar: "Translation".
   
   First of all select the appropriate translation table (or genetic code). If you're unsure which one to use, leave the default setting "Standard Code"
   

Now you have a couple of options on how to proceed. Let's take a look at them one by one.

Option 1- Show all frames

If you're unsure which reading frame to choose, select this tool. It will open up a new window, where you can inspect your sequence in detail and see all three forward frames.

The top row shows your nucleotide sequence, the bottom three rows show the three forward reading frames. Every arrow denotes a three-nucleotide codon.
Codons colored in green are start codons, red denotes a stop codon.

Click on a codon to select the start of your sequence, click again on a codon in the same frame to select the end of your sequence.
On the bottom right a button named "Export selected" appears. By clicking it, the selected protein sequence gets exported to your project.

Stop codons are written as asterisks (*). They are ignored for any further analysis such as alignments.
Instead of selecting the start and the end by hand, you can also Shift-Click on a codon and the selection is automatically extended to the most upstream start codon and the next downstream stop codon. This makes it easy to select an open reading frame (ORF) quickly.

Option 2- Translate directly

If you know beforehand which frame you want to use to translate your sequences, choose the appropriate Frame directly (e.g. "Forward 1" for Frame 1). This translates the entire DNA sequence to the corresponding protein sequence, without taking start and stop codons into special consideration.

The sample sequence from above was translated using Frame 1.
It's also possible to select reverse frames (e.g. "Reverse 1"); this is essentially a shortcut of taking the Reverse Complement of the sequence and translate the resulting sequence using Forward Frame 1.

Option 3- Best guess

The easiest way is to let GeneWarrior make a best guess. This is done by automatically selecting the longest open reading frame (ORF) on all three forward and all three reverse reading frames.
If no ORF can be found (e.g. for short sequences) a warning is returned.
The sample sequence from above was translated using the "Best guess"-Tool, resulting in the longest possible ORF. The details on which subsequence was selected is added to the name.

For an explanation about Translation see What is a Translation?

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