Cell growth and cell death

Cell growth and cell death

I. Altered behavior of cancer cells

A. What controls cell number? Cell proliferation vs cell death

B. The hallmarks of cancer

II. Cell proliferation

A. Cell division

B. Cell division cycle: S phase and M phase

C. Discovering the regulators of cell division

D. Regulation of cell division and how it is altered in cancer cells

E. Normal cell division

III. Cell death

A. Cell death

B. Experiment addressing the hypothesis that it is a controlled and regulated process

C. Examples of cell death

D. Mechanism of cell death

Study Question:

1. How does evading growth suppression and inducing angiogenesis (production of more blood capillaries) lead to excess cells in cancer?

2. How does a decrease in cell death (apoptosis) contribute to tumor formation?

3. What is cell proliferation?

4. What would happen to the DNA content of a cell if M phase happened in G1 before S phase?

5. Propose an experiment you could do to determine if there were an S-phase promoting factor? What would the results be if there were? What of there were not?

6. Would an excess or loss of cell death contribute to cancer? Why?

7. Would you expect that a human gene involved in mediating cell death could function in C. elegans? (Imagine having a C. elegans mutant which lacks the function of the homologous gene so that cell death does not occur and introducing the normal human version of the gene, what do you think would happen?) Why?

8. What is the function of ced-4 and ced-3 in regulating cell death?

9. What would you expect to be the result of expressing active ced-3 in all of the cells of a C. elegans embryo? Why?

Powerpoint below