Plymouth Elementary School first grade students celebrate the groundbreaking of the new Legoland Discovery Center at Plymouth Meeting Mall by playing in a pile of more than 50,000 Lego bricks spilled by a dump truck at the Oct. 25 ceremony. | Photo courtesy Legoland Discovery Center.
If this DNA has a mutation, the child that grows from the fertilized egg will have the mutation in each of his or her cells. Acquired (or somatic) mutations occur at some time during a personâs life and are present only in certain cells, not in every cell in the body.
In biology, a mutation is a permanent change of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements. DNA damage can cause an error when the DNA is replicated, and this error of replication can cause a gene mutation that, in turn, could cause a genetic disorder. DNA damages are repaired by the DNA repair system of the cell.