Question: If you were to find a mutation in cells, would you experiment with them?

David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:

Good question.

It would depend what the mutation did for the cells and how I found the mutation, I think. Mutations are usually very interesting and a lot of scientists make cells with mutations so that they can experiment with them to see what affect the mutation has.

Mutations often have the effect of turning off the gene that is mutated or stop it working properly. If you turn off 1 gene, then anything that happens differently in your experiments is because of that 1 gene, so you can find out what the gene normally does. In other cases mutations can make a gene work slightly differently and again you look at results from experiments to see what affect that mutation has.

My work is on the way stem cells use sugar, so if I found a mutation in a gene related to the way stem cells use sugar, then it would be really interesting for me to find out what the mutation does and why it has that affect so that I could learn more about the normal way that stem cells use sugar.

If I found a mutation that affected something completely different, then I might not study it and do experiments with it, because it would not be in my area of interest, but I might do a few experiments and then pass on my information and the cells to someone else who would be more interested.