mutation
Sign in to savethumb|Three major single-chromosome mutations: deletion (genetics)|deletion (1), duplication (2) and inversion (3).
AI overview
A mutation is a change in an organism's genetic material, such as when a section of DNA is deleted, copied extra times, or flipped around. Mutations matter because they create genetic variation in populations, which can lead to evolution, disease, or sometimes have no noticeable effect at all.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Article
36 sectionsContents
- Overview
- Causes
- Spontaneous mutation
- Error-prone replication bypass
- Errors introduced during DNA repair
- Induced mutation
- Classification of types
- By effect on structure
- Large-scale mutations
- Small-scale mutations
- By impact on protein sequence
- By effect on function
- By effect on fitness (harmful, beneficial, neutral mutations)
- Distribution of fitness effects (DFE)
- By inheritance
- Germline mutation
- Somatic mutation
- Special classes
- Nomenclature
- Mutation rates
- Randomness of mutations
- Disease causation
- Inherited disorders
- Role in carcinogenesis
- Beneficial and conditional mutations
- Role in evolution
- Compensated pathogenic deviations
- Compensatory mutations in RNA
- Evolutionary mechanism of compensation
- Experimental evidence of compensatory mutations
- Experiment in bacteria
- Experiment in virus
- Application in human evolution and disease
- See also
- References
- External links
thumb|Three major single-chromosome mutations: deletion (genetics)|deletion (1), duplication (2) and inversion (3).
In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Mutations result from errors during replication, mitosis, meiosis, or damage to DNA, which then may trigger error-prone repair or cause an error during replication (translesion synthesis). Mutations may also result from substitution, insertion or deletion of segments of DNA due to mobile genetic elements.