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.
But, the truth is that most mutations are not that extreme. In biology, a mutation is any change in the nucleotide sequence of DNA. Some mutations affect large sections of DNA, and others only affect certain points along the DNA strand. These small, specific mutations are called point mutations.