The phrase ‘It’s all in your DNA’ has probably made many a biologist grind her teeth. Apart from the over-reach, it turns out that we may not always know precisely what a DNA sequence encodes. The ‘universal’ genetic code that maps a nucleotide triplet to an amino acid is changed in several contexts (Baranov et al. 2015; Ling et al. 2015). For example, the 21st and 22nd amino acids selenocysteine and pyrrolysine are encoded by stop codons UGA and UAG in specific sequence contexts. While the universal genetic code specifies CUG as leucine, the fungus Candida albicans decodes CUG as serine about 97% of the time. In fact, genetic ‘recoding’ is a term that has been in use for several years (reviewed in Baranov et al. 2015).