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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 14 2016, @03:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the head-scratching-begins dept.

Having an extra chromosome may suppress cancer, as long as things don't get stressful, a new study suggests. The finding may help scientists unravel a paradox: Cells with extra chromosomes grow slower than cells with the usual two copies of each chromosome, but cancer cells, which grow quickly, often have additional chromosomes. Researchers have thought that perhaps extra chromosomes and cancer-causing mutations team up to produce tumors.

Jason Sheltzer, a cell biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and colleagues examined the effect of having an extra chromosome in mouse cells that also have cancer-promoting mutations. Cells with an extra copy of a chromosome — known as trisomic cells — grew slower in lab dishes and formed smaller tumors in mice than cells with cancer mutations but no extra chromosomes. Even when trisomic cells carry cancer-associated genes on the extra chromosome, the cells make less than usual of the cancer-driving proteins produced from those genes, Sheltzer reported December 5 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Immerman on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:17PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:17PM (#441265)

    Downs Syndrome is specific to having a third copy of all or part of chromosome 21, there are 22 other chromosome pairs present as well...

    In addition, cancer cells are (generally?) mutants themselves, genetically distinct from the surrounding normal tissue, with some of those mutations being responsible for their malignant behavior. Of course that's nothing particularly special, a lot of your healthy cells are mutants as well, cell replication being an imperfect process, but most mutations are either relatively harmless, or end up killing the mutant cells themselves (so, still basically harmless to the host)

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