![]() Medical geneticist ( talk) 13:27, 17 December 2009 (UTC) Reply This would give us additional insight into the mechanisms of carcinogenesis, and hopefully point towards effective treatments. What many cancer biologists are doing these days is to examine "cancer genomes" to generate catalogs of all the mutations found in individual tumor samples, then to see whether the same mutations keep coming up over and over again in different people. Not surprisingly, they also accumulate a lot of mutations that probably have no effect at all. They just accumulate mutations that activate certain genes (see oncogene) or inactivate other genes (see tumor suppressor gene). Cancer cells still follow the same "rules" when translating the genetic information. The article title (and the answer by Jkasd) confuses the distinction between the "code" (which is invariant) and the "genome" (which can be highly variable). Mutations aren't changes to the "genetic code" but changes in the genome. This is different than the genome - the entirety of all the genetic information in a cell - which differs between individuals, and which can accumulate mutations in different cells throughout the life of the organism. The "genetic code" is basically the same among all species, with some rare "variants" described in certain single-celled organisms. If you read the article on genetic code, it explains that the "code" is the set of rules used by the cell to translate the instructions encoded in the DNA into the proteins that actually do the work in the cell. Sp in ni ng Spark 12:22, 17 December 2009 (UTC) Reply Your confusion is caused by an unfortunate oversimplification made by the journalist who wrote the article, not the scientists who carried out the research. Sp in ni ng Spark 12:17, 17 December 2009 (UTC) Reply One more article you may want to read is tumor suppressor gene. ![]() Note also, that a predisposition to some cancers can be hereditary (covered in the cancer article) and so these too, can be detected by looking for the genetic marker. J kasd 11:33, 17 December 2009 (UTC) Reply We have an article on this, gene expression profiling in cancer, and see also oncogenomics. I haven't studied genetics too much so my answer is probably lacking in some way. I believe the hope is that by recording these they can gain insight into which mutations will cause cancer, so the oncogenes I guess. ![]() The mutations are changes to the genetic code genome so the cancer cells do have a different code genome from the healthy cells, but it's not the necessarily the same for ever cancer cell as they are mostly random changes. ![]() 78.149.247.13 ( talk) 10:46, 17 December 2009 (UTC) Reply I believe you are right about mutations causing cancer if I'm reading the article correctly, it seems that they're just recording what those mutations are. I thought only a proper species would have a distinctive genetic code. Please explain how cancer has a genetic code, accoding to this I thought cancer was just the result of unlucky mutations caused by bad environmental things (like smoking, too much sun, sodium nitrate etc). ![]()
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