Demosthenes had five triremes and their complements of soldiers as a garrison, and was reinforced by 40 hoplites from a Messenian ship that happened to stop at Pylos.
Individual codons code for specific amino acids. A gene is a sequence of nucleotides along a DNA strand-with 'start' and 'stop' codons and other regulatory elements-that specifies a sequence of amino acids that are linked together to form a protein.
A gene may determine a characteristic of an individual by specifying a polypeptide chain that forms a protein or part of a protein (structural gene); or encode an RNA molecule; or regulate the operation of other genes or repress such operation.