Mutations span five orders of magnitude — from one nucleotide to entire chromosomes — and consequence scales with the size of the edit. Move the slider to explore the mutation hierarchy and watch how the same DNA sequence responds to changes at different scales.
Point mutations substitute one nucleotide for another, but the genetic code's redundancy means outcome varies wildly. A silent mutation changes the codon yet codes for the same amino acid due to wobble pairing — no functional consequence. A missense mutation swaps in a different amino acid, which may or may not disrupt protein function depending on location and chemical similarity. A nonsense mutation introduces a premature stop codon, truncating the protein and usually destroying function entirely. Same mutation type, three radically different severities — all determined by how the new codon translates through the codon table.
Mutation severity scales with scope: substitutions can be silent, frameshifts scramble everything downstream, and aneuploidy disrupts entire gene dosage networks across a chromosome.