What type of mutations affect the primary amino acid sequence of the protein?

To understand what type of mutations affect the primary amino acid sequence of a protein, it’s important to look closely at the types of mutations listed.

Point mutations are specific alterations in a single nucleotide in the DNA sequence, which can lead to changes in the primary amino acid sequence if they occur in coding regions and result in amino acid substitutions. These mutations can have significant effects depending on whether they result in a missense mutation (changing one amino acid to another) or a nonsense mutation (creating a premature stop codon).

Insertion mutations involve the addition of one or more nucleotides into a DNA sequence. This can disrupt the reading frame (frameshift mutation), altering the sequence of amino acids downstream of the insertion site and hence affecting the protein's primary structure.

Silent mutations, by contrast, are changes in the DNA sequence that do not affect the amino acid sequence of the protein. These occur often because of the redundancy in the genetic code; different codons can code for the same amino acid, so a mutation might not lead to any functional change in the protein.

Given this information, the type of mutation that directly affects the primary amino acid sequence of the protein primarily refers to point mutations and insertions. Expressed mutations is a term that could refer to