Many procedures suggest that when mutagenizing bacterial cells with UV light, the dish of cells should be shaken gently during the actual mutagenesis. Can you speculate on the reason for this? Suppose you are working in a genetics laboratory and want to select bacterial mutants of a certain type. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using UV light as your mutagenic agent?

When talking about mutagenesis,we take into consideration the shaking of dish of cells in a manner that is gentle inorder to mix the sample with the agar gel so that they will be able to spread on the surface of the agar plate.

This dish is shakes gently so that there will will be oxygen supply and proper aeration.

Below are the advantages of using UV light as a mutagenic agent.

- Using of UV light is very cheap and and there is no need to buy additional equipments or reagents.

- The UV induced mutatins are more likely a natural mutation that is mutation that occurs naturally.

- No specialized training is required to use UV light hence it is a very easy technique and very easy to use.

- To use a chemical poses a great risk but to use a UV lamp is safer as the lamp is generally in a closed box and there is no danger to the researcher example exposure to the researcher.

Below are also the disadvantages of using UV light as a mutagenic agent.

- Sometimes,UV mutagenesis does not give rise to mutants that has the desired phenotype.

- Generation of mutations by UV mutagenesis is in a very random way hence it will generate more than one mutation in a genome.