What follows below is very abbreviated, but should be adequate for our purposes. Protein synthesis is the process of turning the genetic information in the DNA into the proteins that carry out the functions of the cell. Proteins are critical because they influence the rate of almost every chemical reaction that takes place in an organism and they are important in determining an organism's structure.
All proteins are chains of smaller molecules, called amino acids.
The precise sequence of amino acids determines the protein's overall structure and shape, and its specificity as an enzyme. There are 20 different amino acids that occur in the proteins of living organisms. So you can imagine a protein as a beaded necklace with beads of twenty different colors, each color representing a different amino acid. Only this necklace has a very specific shape determined by the sequence of color beads. The information necessary to do this is stored in DNA molecules that form the chromosomes inside each cell.