| Answer Questions through CULearn |
Tutorial |
You isolate a strain of E. coli in which there is a mutation in a gene encoding an important polypeptide. The wild type polypeptide is 541 amino acids long. The mutation changes the nucleotide sequence encoding amino acid 102 from a UGU (which encodes the amino acid cysteine) to UGA (a stop codon). The mutant strain grows only 10% as fast as the wild type strain. Q1: How will the mutant polypeptide differ from the wild type polypeptide? And what do we mean by "wild type"? Q2: There are multiple genes for each tRNA used in E. coli; how might the effects of the mutation described above be partially reversed by a mutation in a tRNA gene? Q3: What effects would such a mutant tRNA gene have on a wild type cell? |
![]() |