There are two alleles that determine the sensitivity of a person to Coumadin (a medicine for blood thinners used to treat a stroke etc). Sometimes you encounter the terminology that one has a mutation on both alleles (father's and mother's side). But why is that called a mutation and not just a variation? Does a mutation mean that it changed during lifetime, or is the difference between mutation and variation arbitrarily defined? Or is there really a kind of standard taken where deviations are considered to be mutations?
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