Upon inoculation into a new culture, bacteria cells will immediately start to grow exponentially.

A. Deletion: A deletion mutation removes one or more nucleotides from the DNA sequence. While deletions can lead to frameshifts and potentially premature stop codons, the key feature in this scenario is the introduction of a stop signal, not the removal of nucleotides per se.

B. Nonsense: A nonsense mutation changes a codon that encodes an amino acid into a stop codon. In this example, “THE CAT ATE THE BIG RAT” is truncated to “THE CAT ATE (stop),” indicating translation terminates prematurely. This type of mutation produces a truncated, usually nonfunctional protein.

C. Silent: A silent mutation changes a nucleotide without altering the amino acid sequence. It does not produce a stop codon or truncate the protein, so it would not result in “THE CAT ATE (stop).”

D. Missense: A missense mutation changes a codon so that a different amino acid is incorporated. While it alters the protein sequence, it does not introduce a stop codon, so it cannot account for the premature termination seen here.

E. Insertion: An insertion adds one or more nucleotides into the sequence. Like deletions, insertions can cause frameshifts that might eventually produce a stop codon, but the defining characteristic in this example is the direct conversion of a codon to a stop codon, making this a nonsense mutation rather than a generic insertion.

A. Positive-sense RNA: Positive-sense RNA viruses possess genomes that function directly as messenger RNA (mRNA). After entering the host cell, the viral RNA can immediately bind to host ribosomes and begin translation to produce viral proteins. No transcription step is required before protein synthesis, these viruses can rapidly initiate replication once infection occurs.

B. Negative-sense RNA: Negative-sense RNA viruses have genomes that are complementary to mRNA and therefore cannot be translated directly by host ribosomes. Before protein synthesis can occur, the virus must first use an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to synthesize a complementary positive-sense RNA strand. Only this newly formed RNA can function as mRNA for protein production.

C. Double-stranded RNA: Double-stranded RNA viruses contain both a positive and a negative RNA strand. However, the host cell cannot directly translate the double-stranded genome. The virus must first use viral RNA polymerase enzymes to transcribe the negative strand into a positive-sense RNA that can serve as mRNA for translation.