[Sticks]

Originally posted by Lauren

I think thats what I mean. LMAO, I'm really bad at science.

So DNA from bacteria can mutate (thus causing frame shift). This changes the tertiary structure of the protein and so the active site can no longer ... do something. I've totally confused myself haha!

Any scientists in here?

How about visiting this site as it has information about evolution.

The correct term would be evolved from the original single celled organism, repeat bacteria are already complex organisms.

My scientific discipline was physics, however here goes

Deoxyribonucleic acid stores information based on arrangements of many of the four different types amino acids in a long double helix. The amino acids are, Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine.

DNA is a molecule that replicates, and in order to do this require s ribonucleic acid to create the copies. Sometimes in this copying a mistake occurs, sort of like when you are asked to hand copy a text from a book with fine print. These mistakes are what we call mutations.

All this is goes on in the nucleus of the cell, be it plant or annimal.

For more information on DNA

Now scale this up to an animal say, a mutation affects how the new animal turns out, and can impact on its chance of surviving to reproduce. Now there are three types of mutation, harmful, neutral and beneficial. Harmful mutations will mean that natural selection will remove that animal from the gene pool. Neutral mutations do nothing and "benficial" mutations will mean that the animal will survive to reporoduce and pass on the beneficial gene to another generation. So the theory goes.

The fly in the ointment is that we do not document good mutations in nature, only the harmful ones. Now there is the argument that bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a good example of good mutations, but this is caused by plasmids and is nothing to do with mutations.