BIOLOGY 172 Study Guide - Final Guide: Sieve Tube Element, Lysogenic Cycle, Hypothalamus
Document Summary
There are lots of cells, lots if divisions, and lots of mutations. Cancer cannot come into being with just one mutation, but it is the continuous mutations in a single lineage of cells that leads to a cancer phenotype. So, basically cancer begins with one parent cell and the mutations that occur in their offspring is how cancer comes into being. Uncontrolled proliferation, rapid cell cycle progression, ability to migrate, escape from immune system, loss of ability to suicide. Basically, the point is to know that cancer is characterized by more than the fact that cells are dividing uncontrollably. A deletion, chromosomal duplication, frameshift mutation, missense and nonsense mutations, hyper-methylation, hypo-methylation, insertions, retroviral insertion. Pretty much any disruption to the genome has the potential to cause cancer depending on which genes its affects. The longer a person is alive, the more cell divisions their cells undergo and therefore they have a higher rate of mutation.
