Cancer in a single catastrophe

Most of the time cancer seems to creep up gradually over time; cells become premalignant, then increasingly abnormal before they become cancerous. But sometimes cancers seem to pop up as if out of nowhere. Now, researchers reporting in the January 7th issue of the journal Cell have new evidence to explain how that can happen. Based on the DNA sequences of multiple cancer samples of various types, they show that cancer can arise suddenly in the aftermath of one-off cellular crises involving tens to hundreds of genomic rearrangements.

Read the whole article on Physorg

More from Physorg