Illegitimate recombination

This insertion of genetic material which is not meant to be adjacent tends to lead to genes being broken causing the protein which they encode to not be properly expressed.

A 700-1400 base pair segment of DNA was found to have inserted itself into the gal and lac operons resulting in a strong polar mutation.

[2] This mechanism was then found to have the ability to insert other short genetic sequences into other locations within the bacterial genome often leading to a change in the expression of neighboring genes.

In a deletion mutation the prokaryotic organism undergoes illegitimate recombination resulting in the removal of a continuous segment of genetic code.

This process is common for eukaryotic cells and tends to act as a repair mechanism, but can lead to these mutations if illegitimate recombination occurs.

The illegitimate recombination will often take the form of large chromosomal aberrations within a eukaryotic organism as it has much larger segments of DNA than prokaryotic cells.