Mitosis and cancer essays

Mitosis and cancer essays Mitosis is the process of division that produces two daughter cells that are genetically identical to each other and the parent cell. Cancer is an uncontrolled proliferation of cells dividing. Mitosis ensures that every cell in an organism carries the same chromosomes. Mitosis is how our bodies grow and reproduce damaged cells. The mitosis part in cell reproduction is actually the smallest part of the over all cell cycle. The cell spends most of its time in interphase. In the first stage (G1) it is primarily for cell growth. The second stage (S) is the synthesis phase where the genetic material duplicates. The third stage (G2) it is a prep stage and a check stage for the DNA. Then the last stage would be mitosis, in which the cell would go through prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase until cytokinesis where the cytoplasm divides and you have two daughter cells. Cancer In some cases the rate is fast; in others, slow; but in all cancers the cells never stop dividing. Cancer cells are clones. No matter how many trillions of cells are present in the cancer, they are all descended from a single ancestral cell. A single cell in a tissue suffers a mutation in a gene involved in the cell cycle. This results in giving that cell a slight growth advantage over other dividing cells in the tissue. As that cell develops into a clone, some if its descendants suffer another mutation in another cell-cycle generation. This further messes with the cell cycle of that cell and its descendants. As the rate of mitosis in that clone increases, the chances of further DNA damage increases. Eventually, so many mutations have occurred that the growth of that clone becomes completely unregulated. Thus, the result is uncontrolled cellular mitosis, which leads to full-blown cancer. Sometimes a normal cell can undergo a transformation - it will become cancerous. This transformation can occur due to a variety of factors including expos...