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.
If you change a nucleotide in DNA, every strand of RNA transcribed from it would be flawed throughout the cell's life. And if that cell divides, then you have two cells with the mutation and so on. This could possibly produce thousands of cells that have an incorrect gene sequence, which may kill the organism. So mutation of RNA is possible, but its effects are not noticeable, where as DNA mutations can have a rather drastic effect.