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.
Even if a mutation occurred in every 1 out of 1,000,000 RNA copies, the effects would be minimal and unrecognizable. If the DNA is altered, however, this can be considered a permanent mutation, one which can corrupt every strand of RNA and thus every protein made from then on.