If a cell reproduces through cytokinesis, it goes through a circle of duplicating cell organelles and, of course duplicating the dna. If a mistake happens, the cell can, in most times correct the error with no problems whatsoever. If this mistake cannot happen though, the cell will commit suicide through apoptosis. If a mutation in the dna occured and has effected the segment in the dna to start the process of killing the cell, then the cell can reproduce with this error indefinetaly and even manipulate the body to give him its own blood supply, effectively starting what we call "cancer". But why arent we all diagnosed with that disease? Shouldnt at least some cell in our body, aside from the millions created every second, be cancerous and grow into an agressive tumor?
Why isn't every living being diagnosed with cancer?
i think immune system deals with cancer up to a certain point
Technically your body does have several cells a day undergo some form of "cancer" but almost every time either apoptosis or your immune system destroys them.
Cancer is when those two fail and you get a tumor.
Everybody does get cancer, it just depends if your body is full of growth hormone and chooses to replicate the misbehaving cancer cell or kill it off to conserve energy (fasting/chemo).
news.usc.edu
our cells have mechanisms that are pretty good at checking errors during dna duplication
that's why having cancer is a one in a million chance, and these odds can only be reduced when you induce your cells to produce more mutations than usual (e.g. eating processed food, radiation exposure, etc.)
Cells were a mistake
What's wrong with processed food? What is processed food?
>cancer is one in a million
Lol oh user, if only that was true
i fucking told you
Can viruses not get cancer? They replicate with DNA right
Viruses don't have cells
Why don't whales get cancer all the time? They have many times the cells we do and therefore many times the amount of replications so it follows that the incidence of cancer in whales should be higher in whales than in humans. This is called Peto's paradox.
Some dude who worked in the anti-cancer industry was on here last night and explained why Elephants don't get cancer all the time.
Longer story short is they have like 20 copies of each anti-cancer gene.
>What is processed food?
Fast food
>each anti-cancer gene.
It was 20 of tp53 iirc
Are there any downsides to having more "anticancer" genes? If we artificially added extra genes to our own DNA would we live longer or essentially give ourselves down syndrome?
There are probably people with copy number variants of key genes. But if it doesn't provide a reproductive advantage then it's not gonna be widespread.
You could probably add extra genes with no problem, but we're not there yet. There would likely be negligible down sides, like wasting amino acids and energy on extra anti-cancer proteins
Given how nutrition is so important for brain development, if you fuck with adding too much shit, you may ruin the efficiency that we've evolved
That's actually terrifying
So cancer is just an evolutionary disadvantage induced by overconsumption of certain foods and habits? Interesting theory...
Another thought is that so-called 'anti-cancer' (or tumour suppressor) genes are only labelled as such as this is how we deem their importance in the realms of disease.
They are that and more in reality - they induce processes like apoptosis and cell cycle arrest to determine individual cellular fates on a fine-tuned level. This means they have a normal and everyday physiological use. For example, there is some amount in the billions of cases of programmed cell death in a human every day.
Like everything in biology there is a fine balance, and what might be beneficial in moderation could be detrimental if that balance was upset and certain signalling pathways become unregulated. This could be an outcome of genetic engineering
These genes are also highly related to embryonic development. There could be potential knock-on effects there too if the genetic alteration was employed at the earliest stages of development (which is the most likely possibility as it looks currently, being the only way to introduce systemic change throughout an individual's genome).
However, I see no potential problem to the approach evolution has taken in elephants () via gene duplication events for tumour supressors. The only concern would be ensuring the duplicates retain activity to be functionally redundant in the case of mutation.
How do they reproduce?
The hull of the virus attaches to the lipid wall of the cell and injects theyr rna into it. This causes the cell to build the virus rna into its own dna, wich in turn means that now thousands of little viruses are produced in intercellular space. This goes on until the cell doesn't have the resources to stay alive or the rna has reached a critikal point of concentration in the cell. At this point the rna will go throu different phases of being rebuild and reconstructed and whatnot, but simplified the rna will be moved to the lipid wall and be build into a new virus hull.
>tl;dr
by hijacking cells and their resources
>Are there any downsides to having more "anticancer" genes?
>Silvia Kang, a former graduate student in the laboratory of co-senior author Paul Allen, Ph.D., the Robert L. Kroc Professor of Pathology and Immunology, created the mouse model by crossbreeding two mouse lines they had developed for cancer immune therapy research. Each mouse line had one protein knocked out that restrained immune T cells from shifting into attack mode.
>“The idea was to see if we could create super killer T cells we could use to attack tumors,” says Allen. “But all the mice became sick early on, started to lose weight and we soon realized that they all had serious gastrointestinal issues.”
It's a balance of pro and anti-apoptotic factors. Not hard to imagine how dialling up the pro-apoptotic 'anti-cancer' parts of the system would produce problems in normal tissue. Some people think this is part of the cause of some autoimmune diseases (SLE, RA, perhaps MS etc)
Perhaps Crohn's and UC, too. There is surely a reason the pro-apoptotic instruments we have are tuned to such a fine degree.
that's probably why immune system go down cancer go up as you age
Wtf I hate virus now!
Yes however most of them are either harmless or destroyed by the immune system. The diagnosis of cancer is given only when the immune system fails to destroy cancerous cells and they begin to develop into a tumor.
Bump