New answers tagged cancer
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How can a non-mutagenic agent be carcinogenic?
An agent that causes overexpression of oncogenes or inhibition of tumor supressors, would be carcinogenic but not mutagenic.
HPV, for instance, produces proteins that cause inactivation and degradation of tumor suppressors, p53 and pRb[1].
Regarding alcohol. As you guessed, alcohol is metabolized to form ...
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Alcohol itself is non-mutagenic because it does not directly alter DNA. (Additionally ethanol enhances carcinogenesis and is itself not a carcinogen - updated) There are similar non-mutagenic carcinogens such as estrogen - which is a carcinogen. Another important thing to realize is that a non-mutagenic carcinogen may not alter DNA, but instead alter ...
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NRAS is indeed a molecular switch, as part of the MAP-Kinase signaltransduction pathway it acts in controling the signal which goes downstream and finally will cause the expression of genes. In the case of NRAS this includes genes for proliferation, which is important for tumors. In principle, this looks like shown on this figure (from here):
RAS (this is ...
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This is a hard question to answer because each type of cancer is a whole different game at the molecular level, however there is something you might be interested in called "hallmarks of cancer" (image 1) which are key features for cancer to thrive. They were originally described by Hanahan and Weinberg (2000) and have been revisited by Fouad and Aanei (2017)...
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