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Mutation

 Mutation

The phenotype of an organism basically depends on the genetic information stored in DNA and the final outcome is a result of the interaction between genetics of the organisms and the effects of the environment.

Alterations in DNA may bring about certain changes in the characters of individuals in a species, which result in phenotypic variation among organisms. These changes occur permanently, and are called mutations.

Mutations are the sources of variation seen among individuals of a species.

The effect of a mutation may be neutral, beneficial or deleterious. Deleterious mutations may be lethal or at least they are less favorable than the original phenotype. A mutation may also cause complete loss of a function. In rare occasions, the function of a polypeptide may be enhanced due to a mutation. These are beneficial mutations. Entirely new functions may also be resulted by mutations. For example, an enzyme specific to a substrate may change due to mutation in such a way that it changes its specificity to act on another substrate. The product due to the mutation is capable of catalyzing a new biochemical reaction.

There are two major types of mutations based on the scale of alterations in the genetic material; small-scale changes occurring in the sequence of nucleotides in a gene or large-scale changes in the number or the structure of chromosomes. These are known as gene mutations and chromosome aberrations or chromosome mutations, respectively.


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