How might a mutation cause a beneficial effect on protein fu

How might a mutation cause a beneficial effect on protein function? ________ How might a mutation have a harmful effect on protein function? ________ Why does a silent mutation have no apparent affect on an organism? ________ How would the citrate mutation in E. coli give it an advantage over other E. coli populations?

Solution

3).

A permanent change in the sequence of nucleotides of the genome is called mutation, which results in altered or absence of corresponding protein synthesis.

The change in single nucleotide results in point mutation, which is of different types such as silent mutations, missense mutations, nonsense mutations, and frame-shift mutations.

As the genetic code is redundant, a single amino acid may have more than one codon. For example, the amino acid glutamic acid can be coded by two different codons such as GAA and GAG.

As both the triplets code for the same amino acid, no functional change in the protein synthesis occurs. These type of mutations are called as silent mutations (a type of point mutation), and it commonly occurs in several cells, but the phenotypic characters are not expressed out. Thus, silent mutations are not harmful to the organisms.