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Chromosomal Mutations Lead to Aggressive Lymphomas

As deaths due to cancer are on the rise, many researchers are devoting a lot of their

time to understand what causes the disease in order to better understand how to treat it. For

example, Foijer et al has released a publication called Chromosome instability induced by Mp1

and p53 mutation generates aggressive lymphomas exhibiting aneuploidy-induced stress. This

paper focuses on experiments the researchers conducted in order to understand how mutating

DNA leads to aggressive cancers—in this case, acute lymphoblastic lymphoma of T-cells (T-ALL).

T- ALL is simply a cancer of the lymphatic system that is an important part of the body’s

immune system. This is a cancer of the body’s T-cells, which are the cells that hunt down and

kill cells that are infected with germs or have become cancerous. When the cells of the immune

system become abnormal, they can grow and spread throughout our body at an uncontrollable

rate that is dangerous and leads to death if untreated, as with most cancers. Many cancers are

caused by mutations in our DNA. However, it is important to understand that many of these

mutations are inherited from parents and cancer does not usually arise from a single

discrepancy in our genome, but rather from having several mutations that were either inherited

from birth or accumulated over time. The cells in our body are constantly dividing to replenish

older, dying cells and when they grow and divide, sometimes genetic information gets switched

around, left out, or added in new cells due to errors. Usually, when a cell has too many errors in

its DNA, it will commit cellular suicide so it does not transmit this information. However, certain

errors turn off this protective mechanism, setting the stage for a cell with errors in its genetics

to spread—which can turn into cancer.

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The paper published by Foijer et all perfectly demonstrates the concept that several

mutations lead to aggressive cancers. In their experiments, they used mice to show that when

there is a mutation in only one gene, cancer usually does not arise. However, with two mutated

genes that are important to the cell life cycle, aggressive cancer arises. Another concept this

paper also demonstrated that is interesting is that one gene can influence how cells inherit

another. Some of the bred mice that had a mutated version of one gene but a normal version of

the other gene under study developed cells that had mutations of both of the genes they were

looking at—and these cells were the ones that created an aggressive lymphoma that lead to

death of the mice by five months old. This experiments are important to use because scientists

are learning that the mechanisms behind how cancer develops are largely genetic and

treatments are being developed to target these genetic mechanisms. The kind of mutations

these researchers used to demonstrate how cancer develops can be used to identify other

genes that can lead to cancer, as well as genes that suppress cancer. The better understanding

of which genes cause cancer we have, the better we can use drugs to target those genes and

cure certain cancers or prevent them from happening in the first place.
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Works Cited

Foijer, F. et al. “Chromosome Instability Induced by Mps1 and p53 Mutation Generates

Aggressive Lymphomas Exhibiting Aneuploidy-Induced Stress” Proceedings of the National

Academy of the Sciences U.S.A, vol. 111. 16 Sept 2014, pp. 13427-13432. NCBI,

doi:10.1073/pnas.1400892111.