Practice question

Mismatch repair corrects heteroduplex errors post-replication maintaining genome fidelity. When target site contains mismatch that restores restriction recognition after repair, population outcome depends on repair fidelity and efficiency. Full repair yields uniform cleavable or non-cleavable molecules displaying single digestion pattern. Absence of repair yields opposite parental pattern. When efficiency is about fifty percent, culture contains mixture of repaired and unrepaired molecules in roughly equal proportion. Subsequent restriction digestion then produces composite pattern showing both parental and recombinant bands, reflecting heterogeneous pool important for interpreting mutagenesis, recombination, and gene conversion experimental outcomes.