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.