Nuclear genome diversity in somatic cells is accelerated by environmental stress

Dong Wang1, Andrew H Lloyd, Jeremy N Timmis

  • 1Discipline of Genetics, School of Molecular and Biomedical Science, The University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.

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Mutations are changes in the sequence of DNA. These changes can occur spontaneously or they can be induced by exposure to environmental factors. Mutations can be characterized in a number of different ways: whether and how they alter the amino acid sequence of the protein, whether they occur over a small or large area of DNA, and whether they occur in somatic cells or germline cells.
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