Topic summary
Alleles
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Allele.
Alleles can differ at a single position through single-nucleotide polymorphisms, but they can also have insertions and deletions of up to several thousand base pairs. Most alleles result in little or no change in the characteristics of an individual organism but sometimes different alleles can result in different observable phenotypic traits such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria, developmental mutations in fruit flies, and genetic diseases in humans.