A cell is a bag of molecules, all constantly slamming into each other at high speed. Damage to intricate structures such as the packaged DNA of the cell nucleus occurs all time. Most of it is fixed immediately by the highly efficient DNA repair machinery, but a tiny fraction slips through to produce mutations in the sequences describing proteins. In general, even this mutational damage is mostly harmless, except when it hits exactly the right gene to produce a cancerous cell. The damage usually occurs in regions of DNA not used in that cell, or in genes that are used but are not all that important to cell function, or it occurs in a cell that has only a few replications left before reaching the Hayflick limit<…
Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminate Potential Increases the Risk of Stroke
A cell is a bag of molecules, all constantly slamming into each other at high speed. Damage to intricate structures such as the packaged DNA of the cell nucleus occurs all time. Most of it is fixed immediately by the highly efficient DNA repair machinery, but a tiny fraction slips through to produce mutations in the sequences describing proteins. In general, even this mutational damage is mostly harmless, except when it hits exactly the right gene to produce a cancerous cell. The damage usually occurs in regions of DNA not used in that cell, or in genes that are used but are not all that important to cell function, or it occurs in a cell that has only a few replications left before reaching the Hayflick limit<…