Examples of positive mutations in DNA?

Question

Curious on subject at the moment, and dropped science in school last year so cant ask a teacher

Answer 1

positive mutations include being able to eat high fat foods and not having heart disease

Answer 2

What exactly do you mean by a "positive mutation"?

Something like the nylon-eating bacteria, perhaps?

Answer 3

The panda’s "thumb" is actually an enlarged bone of the wrist. In the panda’s environment, bamboo is the main food source. It is difficult to handle and break the hard stalks, so an enlarged wrist bone helps to grasp the bamboo. In another environment where the food source is not plants, an extra ‘finger’ would have little benefit, perhaps even be cumbersome. The mutated hands of pandas have been beneficial only because of their need for a better grip on bamboo.

a mutation of "Sickle Cell Anemia" is able to resist the deadly disease malaria:

here is the website: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/e...c...

"Because people with sickle trait were more likely to survive malaria outbreaks in Africa than those with normal hemoglobin, it is believed that this genetically aberrant hemoglobin evolved as a protection against malaria."

this is a well know example of beneficial mutation.

i believe that there are more.....

its just a quick research.

Hope This Helps! :)

EDIT:

Is the Panda's thumb a genetic mutation? Or simply natural selection? [Ermm exaptation would describe it better]

Or the Panda's large wrist bone being used for more than one use.. [The researchers suggest that the thumb may have originally evolved for a different function: grasping branches. Simocyon may have used this skill to escape from bigger, faster predators. It might have even stolen dead prey cached in trees by saber-toothed cats and retreated out of range. Only after the panda’s thumb evolved in a tree-climbing predator did some descendants co-opt it forfeeding on bamboo. ]

As in.. Has the Panda always done this, and if so, it can't be considered to be a mutation at all if it never changed? [No fossil of panda-like bears has shown any trace of a panda’s thumb]

Sorry about aall the Q's.. Just curious :) [ No Problm, Good Thinking you really should have kept science in school, sounds like a subject of intrest to you! =) ]

Answer 4

There have been hundreds of published instances of beneficial mutations - so many in fact that creationists are finally beginning to back off of this silly question (you can only stretch absurdity so far!)

It's good to be curious about this subject and I encourage your continued individual research - a word of warning though - creationist websites are well known for disseminating lies. Don't make the mistake of believing anything you read on these sites. You also seem to lack an understanding of basic biology/genetics - until you learn a bit more you'll never understand....

Here's a review article from 2003:

http://www.ecologia.unam.mx/laboratorios...

Answer 5

Examples of positive mutations:

antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

nylon-eating bacteria

pesticide resistance in mosquitoes.

Examples in humans:

- lactose tolerance . Normally, humans stop producing the enzyme lactase after they are weaned off breast-milk. but in some populations, a mutation arose which resulted in the enzyme being continually produced, allowing them to digest dairy produce.

- Apolipoprotein A1. A mutation in this protein results in those possessing it being totally immune to cholesterol atherosclerosis and heart disease.

- CCR5 chemokine receptor. A deletion mutation in this gene, missing off a 32 base-pair sequence (and therefore an 8 amino acid section of the final protein) grants immunity to the HIV virus.

Answer 6

A positive mutation would be any change that conveys some sort of survival or reproductive benefit to the organism that carries it.

I know this example gets thrown around a lot, but the mutation that causes sickle-cell disease actually has a benefit if the person carries only one copy of the mutant allele.

As it turns out, being heterozygous gives you an advantage in that it makes you resistant to malaria.  It does't entirely prevent you from getting malaria; it just reduces the odds that you'll die from it.  Of course, any mutation that increases your survival chances will also increase the odds that you'll pass that particular allele on to the next generation.  Yes, it's very dire indeed if you inherit TWO copies of the sickle-cell allele, but that happens infrequently enough that the allele still conveys a net benefit in areas where malaria is rampant.

And of course, the mutations that make bacteria drug-resistant are beneficial (to the bacteria; not to us).  Those antibiotic-resistant bacteria enjoy a great benefit when traditional antibiotics kill off the weaker competition for them.

I hope that helps.  Good luck!

Answer 7

natural selection is caused by advantageous mutations

take the peppered moth which was white. a mutation caused moth which were darker. these blended in with the darkened bark on tree so were more likely to survive. they out competed the white moth so became more common