Discovery of a triple barrier that prevents cells from becoming cancerous
Cell proliferation requires the chromosomes to be copied (replicated) and distributed (segregated) to the two future daughter cells. Cells continually undergo spontaneous alterations (injuries) to the DNA that makes up the chromosomes, because of their aqueous (reactive) environment, for example. In response to DNA injuries, cells put a stop to the cell division cycle, in order to allow time for the injuries to be repaired and prevent the transmission of damaged, incompletely replicated chromosomes. The loss of this capacity leads to the onset of chromosomal instability, a driver of cancerous transformation.
Source & further reading:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=156448&CultureCode=en
Image:
Detail of the cell interior during the cell division process.
#medicaladvance #research #cells #cancer
The human body has so many mysteries left for us to discover, some we will likely never know, but only postulate on or philosophise about. This is one step to beating, or at least making it easier to treat the symptoms of this terrible affliction
ReplyDeleteThe intro launched me on a tangent... making me realize that reasonably cultured and smart curious minds must have inquired on error-correcting codes (ECC) over DNA sequences, so I asked Google, and while there are a couple serious articles, post-2010, asserting limited/complex victory, it's obvious there's no gold immediately under the surface. Then I had my mind blown... over the idea that anyway the picture of error correction, and otoh that of evolution by random variation and natural selection clashed...
ReplyDeleteLife-in-evolution is a negotiation between DNA and reality, and the way this works is for DNA to probe reality with expressions of random noise added on ancestral sequences - at least, that is the basic model. Evolutionary relevant information can thanks to selection hijack noise to swim back upstream, towards DNA. From the side of the environment, the environment sculpts the noise by electing variants to evolve the species towards adaptation. ECC, and Shannon Information Theory, OTOH, are about extirpation of noise from a channel. There is like a sign flip, a radical conflict of intention...
I am in fact rather an adept of the idea that evolution shares mathematical ingredients with error-correcting-codes; the above is saying that their marriage in nature can not be that which first comes to mind upon meeting the idea while in honorable possession of the elementary theory of each.