Single-walled carbon nanotubes can function as nanoscale reaction chambers for growing smaller nanotubes within the host tube from encapsulated fullerenes by annealing. The diameter of the host outer tube restricts the diameter of the inner tube due to van der Waals interactions but not its chirality: it is possible that inner tubes with different chiralities start to grow in different places at the same time. A straight junction occurs at the connection of these two tubes which we refer to as bamboo defects. We show that localized states appear in the calculated density of states associated with these bamboo defects, some of them close to the Fermi level, and present a detailed theoretical study of ballistic transport through double-walled tubes where the inner shell contains bamboo defects. We find that the presence of bamboo defects should be possible to detect through electronic-transport measurements and the number of bamboo defects per unit length can be extracted from the structure of the resonances appearing in the transmission coefficient.