Question

By analogy with automobiles, defects in cancer critical genes have been likened to broken brakes and stuck accelerators, which are caused in some cases through faulty service by bad mechanics. Using this analogy, decide how oncogenes, tumor suppressors genes, and genome maintenance genes relate to broken brakes, stuck accelerators, and bad mechanics

Answer 1

In case of stuck accelerator, by some mechanical defect or bad servicing my a mechanic, it is stuck down and provide unintended acceleration which can be fatal if not controlled in proper way. Stuck accelatoacc could be controlled if your break is fine. But if the break is also broken then it is highly difficult to control the car.

Similar scenario is seen in case of cancer formation in the body. There are various genome maintenance genes in the body. The product of those genes are responsible for the genome stability, i.e, those products helps in prevention of mutation accumulation and cell cycle regulation.

Now, tumor suppresosu genes has major function in the body. They regulate the cell cycle checkpoints, regulate DNA repairing pathways and apoptosis. So any kind of wrong genes or wrong cells will be destroyed by the regulation of tumor suppressor genes, as a result the cellular environment will be cancer free. Basically they suppress the oncogenes which are defected cancer forming genes.

Now oncogenes are those genes which escaped the regulation of tumor suppressor genes and responsible for cancer formation. Once they gets activated unregulated cell cycle events starts as a result irregular cell proliferation occurs and tumor/cancer forms. And there is no "break" to stop that event.

So from the analogy I think this is clear that the genome maintenance genes are the "bad mechanic" whose bad regulation caused the genes to be mutated and made them oncogenes which is "stuck accelerator" and also tumor suppressor genes which have the ability to stop the cancer is now turned into disfunctional tumor suppressor genes that means "broken break".

I hope I could explain this.

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