Questions tagged [cancer]
A malignant group of uncontrollably dividing cells that form a tumour. Questions regarding (proto)oncogenes and tumour-suppressor genes should also use this tag.
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Is proliferating stem cells dangerous on some aspects?
By searching on internet about replication of stem cells, I came across numerous articles speaking about how to activate stem cell proliferation, most articles searching "natural" means for ...
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Have the potential therapeutic applications of cell fusion between cancer cells and neural cells been investigated?
Studies have appeared on the possible role that cell fusion plays in the formation of certain cancers. For instance, Sitar et al. (2019) have looked into the process of cell fusion in the formation of ...
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Contrast Fluids in MRI: Which tissues "glow" first?
I am a bioinformatic and data scientist in progress, working on my Master Thesis about prostate cancer. Now I am at that point, I have a strong guessing, that contrast fluids in magnetic resonance ...
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What is a crypt in a histopathological image?
I am doing a science fair project on using histopathological images for cancer diagnosis, and I came across something that says a characteristic is exemplified by superficial serrated architecture and ...
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Why are lymph nodes located where they are? [closed]
According to the National Cancer Institute, a subdivision of the National Institutes of Health, clusters of lymph nodes are found in the neck, underarm, chest, abdomen, and groin. Why are lymph nodes ...
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immunotherapy - how would the inhibitor detect
It's a known fact that if PD-L1 happens to be on cancer cells, it will signall off to the T-cell's receptor(PD-1) to turn off its activation, resulting in a fact ...
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cancer cell - antigen presenting cell
We all know that if normal cell contains virus inside it, normal cell has mechanism inside it that can detect that it has abnormality inside(virus) and what it will do is present the virus's protein(...
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Is deleting two or three consecutive nucleotides and inserting exactly two or three back more common than two or three consecutive SNP?
I am looking at cancer mutations. I found that some of the mutations are e.g.
c.1251_1252delGGinsTT
c.151_152delGGinsTC
c.351_352delCAinsTT
I wonder if these are indeed two consecutive single ...
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Do cancer cells use as much NADH as normal cells?
Recent literature shows that cancer cells have a different electron transport chain mechanism from normal cells and both of cancer cells and normal cells use NADH as electron donors. So, is there a ...
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Why does a non-functional retinoblastoma protein cause tumours in the cells of the retina specifically?
I know that the name of the protein itself is the retinoblastoma protein - but that's only because the result of a pathogenic variant is retinoblastoma. I'm trying to kind of reverse engineer the name ...
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When do retinal cells stop differentiating? [closed]
I am having a hard time recalling where I had heard this, but I do recall someone saying (perhaps in a video) that cells in the retina divide very rapidly during infancy due to ongoing development of ...
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Cancer: computing the proliferation of DNA mutations in cancer cells
I have a question about cancer. How is it, that in a cancerogenous cell, once a specific gene changes, subsequent DNAs in cells end up exponentially acquiring more and more mutations?
Can, these ...
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Is retinoblastoma truly an autosomal dominant condition?
I am getting, in my opinion, very conflicting information from sources about the inheritance of retinoblastoma, a type of cancer. Hereditary retinoblastoma is associated with defects in the gene ...
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Heat shock proteins in T cells of tumor microenvironment
Analyzing human tumor single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, I found abundant expression of Heat shock protein (HSP) family genes in T cells. My literature review on "HSPs in T cells" ...
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Why doesn't HIV give you cancer if retroviral gene therapy gives you cancer?
More than twenty patients have been treated in France and Britain,
with a high rate of immune system reconstitution observed. Similar
trials were restricted or halted in the US when leukemia was ...
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Need help identifying vascular structures in brain matter
I am working on PET images of the brain. The neuro-oncologist I'm working with identified 2 large high-intensity regions as vascular structures. I've been meaning to ask what structures these are ...
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snRNAseq vs scRNAseq in cancer
my question is about phagocytosis as response to cancer. It is known that cytotoxic T cell may kill a cancer cell and sends cytokines to phagocytes like macrophage or dendritic cell to engulf and ...
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A study claims that the consumption of fish increases the likelihood of getting skin cancer, does this have any relation to their omega-3 content?
A study claims that fish consumption increases the likelihood of getting skin cancer.
Since another older study claimed that omega-3 consumption increases the likelihood of prostate cancer is there ...
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Why don’t all HPV strains cause cancers?
There are roughly a dozen high risk HPV strains responsible for cervical cancer. These strains promote hyperplasia of infected cells by encoding E6 and E7, which potently antagonize tumor suppressor ...
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Expected variant allele frequency of mutation present on 2 out of 3 copies of a 70% purity cancer sample
I am reading Nik-Zainal et al., 2012.
In such paper, (for sample PD4120a - a 188-fold depth ER+ breast cancer tumor), it is stated that:
The sample has 70% tumor purity.
The genome has one triploid ...
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Variant Allele Frequency (VAF) peaks for clonal CNAs
I am reading an overview of the CNAqc package, which defines how the algorithm computes "Variant Allele Frequency (VAF) peaks for clonal CNAs."
mutations present in a percentage $0<c<...
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Targeted gene sequencing and specialist analysis compared to WGS and DYI searches
There seem to be a lot of "genetic consulting" services that focus on things like cancer, with a modus operandi of:
Do targeted gene sequencing (usually on a few tumor suppressor genes ...
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Inheritance likelihood of SNVs vs InDels [closed]
Suppose you have identified a couple of variants in a tumour sample. One of them is a deletion and the other is an SNV in the same gene. You have a familial history of prostate cancer and other ...
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Difference between IC50 and Michaelis-Menten constant
I am new to biology, and getting to know the term IC50, I found that there is a connection between IC50 and Michaelis-Menten constant by the Cheng-Prusoff equation
$K_{i}=\frac{\mathrm{IC}_{50}}{1+\...
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Calculation of drug efficacy- mathematical biology approach
I am participating in a mathematical biology project.
I would like to discuss the following problem:
Let A be a drug such that $x_{o}$ chemical units of it kills 12% of $y$ cells per 1 day, I would ...
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Does cancer really remain undetected about 80% of its life?
I was reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, who mentioned this and decided to google it. The only mention of this at least in the first search page was from this source from February, 2012. Is there ...
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Is it possible to make a vaccine against cancer?
If we can make RNA vaccines against COVID-19 and we know which errors in our DNA leads to different kinds of cancer, can we make a vaccine that will teach our immune system to detect and destroy ...
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How have some cancers "evolved" to be so aggressive and treatment-resistant?
[In this post, I may ascribe agency to processes, inanimate objects or microorganisms: this is rhetorical, I know they don't "intend" anything. I will also use "evolution" in a ...
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Why do tumours need stem cells, when they can generate their own telomerase?
In the molecular biology of the cell (6th ed), it is stated that:
Some cancers seem to be organized in a similar way: they consist of
rare cancer stem cells capable of dividing indefinitly, toghether ...
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Can we cure cancer with CRISPR dead Cas?
Here's a silly idea I had this morning:
Sequence a bunch of normal patient cells.
Sequence a bunch of tumor cells from a biopsy.
Find a DNA sequence that we're reasonably certain exists in the cancer ...
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How do I classify cytotoxicity values, whether a sample is mildly, moderately, or highly cytotoxic?
I used LDH assay for cytotoxicity testing. I have a plant extract which I tested against HepG2 cancer cells. I did three trials, my results were 2%, 6%, and 8% cytotoxicity, respectively.
How do I ...
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How do evolutionary forces influence the number of copies of the p53 gene?
p53 is an important tumor suppressor gene. Around 50% of cancers are associated with loss of function in p53.
Humans have only two copies of p53 in their genome (one on each homologous chromosome). ...
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Why would this viral strain-specific antiserum fail to immunoprecipitate the same (98% identical protein) from another strain?
I'm reading this paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC392475/ and I can't work out why a certain immune serum didn't work on the same viral protein but from different strains.
The serum ...
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Is it possible for a plant extract to have different effects, depending on the type of cell line it was tested on?
My plant extract (ethyl acetate fraction) seems to have two different effects depending on the cell/cell line it's being tested on. On liver cancer cells (HepG2), it is moderately cytotoxic. But on ...
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Why is BRCA-1 mutation a dominant mutation?
BRCA-1 gene is a tumor suppressor gene and undergoes a loss of function mutation to become cancer inducing. Why is it that only one allele needs to be mutated because loss of function mutations are ...
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Do all tumour variants affect the disease pathway
I have analysed some lung tumour samples for somatic variants which generated a list of genes affected by those variants. I tried to analyse KEGG pathways to see what could they disrupt. However, many ...
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Exclusion and inclusion criteria for healthy controls in colorectal cancer study
I'm working on colorectal cancer, and I'm facing a problem in the sampling step, I can't figure out how to choose healthy subjects. In the literature, I've found many criteria that are different and ...
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Data repositories for data on the Tumor Microenvironment?
Does anyone know of any data repositories for data on the Tumor Microenvironment? I know of the The Cancer Gene Atlas and the Gene Expression Omnibus databases but I'm more curious about data on the (...
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Coinfecting oncolytic viruses - first virus carrying the receptor for the second
One challenge to using oncolytic viruses as a treatment for cancer is that the viruses may cause off-target effects. I'm curious to know how useful it would be to create an oncolytic virus that has ...
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HPV. How do viruses persist outside the body?
The main route of transmission of human papillomavirus (HPV) is generally believed to be sexual. While fomites have been postulated for inexplicable infections, sexual health professionals regularly ...
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Why does UV radiation from the Sun cause skin cancer?
What is the specific mechanism makes non-ionizing UVA and UVB radiation carcinogenic? Can lower energy light, like visible light, be carcinogenic because of this mechanism, or is there some kind of ...
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How to assemble three 60mer nts by pcr?
Good morning,
I am new to molecular biology. The question might be silly but i would like to know the answer. I have three 60mer single strand synthetic oligonucleotide. Namely Tag 1 - 3. My goal is ...
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Chromosome Deletion Notation in Cancers
The cancer literature often refers to the deletion of certain sections of a chromosome (e.g. "17p del" or "Del(17p)" for the deletion of chromosome 17's p-arm.)
Does this mean both ...
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Cancer: what does it mean "at presentation"?
Unclear to me what this means:
"Objective The biological heterogeneity of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) makes prognosis difficult. We translate the results of a genome-wide high-throughput ...
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How exactly does chemotherapy cause anemia?
I’ve been trying to figure this out for the past few hours but I still can’t find something as in depth as I’m looking for. So far all I’ve found is that chemo drugs kill bone marrow cells and some ...
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How can Chronic myeloid Leukaemic drugs reduce the production of the Philadelphia genotype?
How can Chronic Myeloid Leukaemic drugs (Tyrosine kinase inhibitors, e.g. imatinib, etc.) that act by inhibiting bind of ATP to the active site of the BCR-ABL1 protein actually reduce the prevalence ...
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CML (Chronic Myeloid Leukemia) and blast cell percentage
I'm trying to understand the oncogenesis of CML. I have a question about CFC cells and blast cells. Are those the same? I know that in the chronic phase of CML there is a blast percentage of 1-10% of ...
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Cancer in cardiac cells
We were recently taught that cancer occurs only in those cells which undergo cell division so, cancer is not possible in cardiac cells and neurons.
But we know that till a certain age our heart grows ...
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When cancer is detectable, how many sub-clones are there at that stage?
I have read somewhere that cancer is detectable when the number of cells reaches $10^7 - 10^9$, which probably varies according to the specific tumor. At this early stage, what is the expected number ...
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Why are organs not harvested from deceased cancer patients?
From my understanding, cancer is not contagious, and if a cancerous cell from a patient is introduced to a healthy person, then the immune system of the latter can destroy this cell. In such a case, ...
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