Question: How would you go about looking for a mutations

Sian Foch-Gatrell answered on 22 Jun 2010:

Firstly you can sequence an organism or part of an organism and compare it to the completed genome sequence of that organism if it is known (it is not known in all species). Or you can use next generation sequencing which can show you what effect a mutation has. Or you can look at changes in the phenotype of an organism (what it looks like on the outside) to see if there has been an underlying mutation that caused it. Or you can do a restriction digest which can be used for cleaving DNA molecules at specific sites, ensuring that all DNA fragments that contain a particular sequence have the same size – so if there is a mutation there it won’t be the right size, or no fragments whatsoever.