General Medicine

» tinuviel - DNA editing

This sentence was snipped from your Impaired DNA Repair article: "However, many cancer cells exhibit mutations within genes that code for proteins involved in DNA mismatch repair."

This is a scary thought. I was just being impressed with the capabilities of these DNA proofreading guys. The idea that these mutations can and do occur in the very mechanism that is put in place to prevent these mutations does pose a problem. Cancer is a cunning little disease, isn't it?

I have a technical question. Does (105) mean 10 to the 5th power--like 10^5? That was a bit confusing for me, because if that's not what it means then I'm a bit lost.

I was also going to ask for some further explanation of methylation, but when I looked it up, it seemed pretty involved and probably too complicated to explain here. I guess it is enough just to know that it allows the newly synthesized DNA to be distinguishable from the parent one. This is pretty interesting stuff, though. Maybe you could write about more things like this in the future.

-- posted by tinuviel