How might a gene mutation be silent, with no observable affect on a cell or an organism?
A. Many proteins are superfluous to the function of a cell. A gene mutation in a gene that encodes an unnecessary protein would have no observable affect on the cell or the organism.
B. Codons are complementary to anti-codons in tRNA. A gene mutation that changes a codon to its anti-codon would have no observable effect on the cell or the organism.
C. Several codons are stop codons. A gene mutation that inserts a stop codon when only a few amino acids remain in the peptide sequence would have no observable effect on the cell or the organism.
D. Many amino acids are coded by multiple codons. A gene mutation that encodes the same amino acid would have no observable effect on the cell or the organism.