Chapter 9 - Patterns of Inheritance Flashcards
What is cancer?
disease of unregulated cell division (occurs quickly)
How do cancerous cells differ from non-cancerous cells?
cells divide inappropriately and accumulate, may form tumors
How is cell cycle altered in cancer cells?
cancer cells evade cell cycle checkpoints
What happens when checkpoints fail?
- damaged checkpoint mechanisms
- DNA damage or errors in chromosome separation are passed onto daughter cells
- these cells bypass apoptosis and with each cell division, damage is perpetuated
What are the types of cancer therapies?
surgery, radiation, chemotherapy
What are the problems with cancer therapies?
- side effects: limited tolerance (killing healthy cells)
- drug resistance: some tumor cells become resistant to therapy, survive and divide
- cell death resistance: some tumor cells mutate apoptosis genes and evade death, live to accumulate even more damage and continue to divide
What will therapies be like in the future?
- better prevention: avoid tobacco
- screening: earlier detection
- targeting: whole genome analysis (selecting treatment for specific type of cancer)
Fighting Cancer: Surgery
- effective for treatment of solid tumors
- not effective for blood cancers or cancers that have undergone metastasis (cancer cell migration)
Fighting Cancer: Chemotherapy
- uses drugs to interfere with cell division to try and treat cancer
- all cells are affected, but more cancer cells die because they are replicating much faster than other cells (which stop to repair DNA damage before next division)
Fighting Cancer: Radiation
-high energy radiation beams are used to kill dividing cells, severely damaging molecules and DNA to trigger apoptosis
What is heredity?
transmission of traits from one generation to the next
What is genetics?
the study of the transmission from one generation to the next (heredity)
What is an allele?
alternative versions of a gene
