Question ID: WS-38
Submitted by: Patrick Brown
February 4, 2011
How do cancer cells survive massive gene-dosage imbalances? Extreme gene-dosage imbalances are a common feature of most cancers and almost universal in many cancers. Because this is one of the most extreme and ubiquitous molecular abnormalities in cancer cells, it is remarkable how poorly we understand the mechanisms that enable cancer cells to mitigate its adverse consequences. There appears to be virtually no dosage compensation at the transcriptional level in tumors with these gene-dosage imbalances. There is equivocal evidence for some post-transcriptional regulation and for cellular mechanisms that allow massive protein dosage imbalances to be tolerated, but its extent, how it works or to what extent it might provide a target for therapy are still a mystery.
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