Cold-Sensitive Mutants (Molecular Biology)

Cold-sensitive mutants are a class of conditional lethal mutants that cannot grow at a temperature below the organism’s normal optimum. The low temperature may be lethal because the mutant form of the protein loses its function or because it forms inappropriate or inhibitory interactions with other proteins. Finding and characterizing second-site revertant mutations that suppress the cold-sensitive phenotype identifies protein-protein interactions (see Temperature-Sensitive Mutation).