What are deletion mutants?

Question

I'm reading a bacteriology article for my Microbiology class and it talks about deletion mutants. I'm wondering what specifically they are.

Answer 1

woohoo! i'm doing microbiology too! anyway its when when theres a mutation (frame shift i think) and a base is deleted.it changes the whole protein structure for everything after the deleted pair.

like if the original is AAGGTTCC, and say G was deleted then it would become AAGTTCC.

urm i think it should be right. but check a textbook or something to be sure. Good Luck!

Answer 2

They are the result of any loss of one or more bases from the DNA. In some cases thousands of bases are lost, stretching over more than one gene.

While frameshift mutants may be due to a single base deletion, they can also be due to an addition: in both cases they misalign the reading frame.

Answer 3

You probably mean "deletion mutation" not "deletion mutant."

A deletion mutation is when one or more base pairs are deleted during replication.