How can a mutation in an organism's genes affect its traits?

Answer:Mutations can affect the body by altering its physical characteristics (or phenotype), or they can affect how DNA (genotype) information is encoded on the organism.

Explanation: three ways a mutation can affect an organism:

Some mutations have no significant effect on the phenotype of the organism. This can happen in many situations: a mutation may occur in a non-functional DNA fragment, or a mutation may occur in the protein encoding region, but ultimately does not affect the sequence of protein amino acids.