The Importance of Genome Maintenance

The importance of maintaining genome is reflected in the role as a defense system against aging and cancer. Both are characterized by genomic instability. In order to investigate genomic maintenance in the context of longevity, we studied the genomes (NMR) of naked hamsters. Nuclear magnetic resonance is the longest-life rodent, and its life span is about 10 times that of mouse and rat. In addition to its lifespan, naked mole rats also show abnormal tolerance to cancer. In contrast, both humans and mice are prone to cancer, but the former survives for a long time, but the latter does not survive.

However, mutations in specific genes are inefficient processes that reflect constant and rigorous maintenance of genomic integrity by a complex series of DNA monitoring and repair enzymes. These genome maintenance teams work to ensure that DNA sequence information maintains its original state ... but cancer occurs frequently in the population and tumor progression reaches dozens To complete after a year

During tumor progression, cancer cells typically typically have a mutation rate by amplifying their susceptibility to mutagens or by breaking the function of the genome and maintaining one or several components of the machine . Among them, the most important is TP 53. If damage can not be repaired, it activates recovery of damaged DNA, blocks the cell cycle and induces senescence or apoptosis. In addition, loss of telomere DNA can also cause karyotypes, explaining telomerase as the basic administrator of genome integrity.

Probably the most important advance in cancer biology is inexpensive and rapid DNA sequencing. Techniques that allow researchers to sequence hundreds of species and individual human genomes are currently applied to the tumor genome. Understanding the genomic sequence of cancer cells allows scientists to understand how tumors originated from normal cells of the body - mutations, whether some of the original genome was lost or replicated, You can learn about whether or not they are similar in all cases. Expansion