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Physiology & Medicine / Re: How Do the Immune Cells Detect The Invading Infection ?
« on: 15/05/2024 08:58:29 »
An addendum re cancer and dna. Dna is generally well sequestered within a cell and is not "visible" to the immune system. What determines the "self" versus "nonself" is the cell surface antigens and sometimes these can reflect changes in dna. Some cancers involve alteration to the cell's dna: the Philadelphia chromosome occurs due to two genes being partially transposed resulting in a new combination, this leads to one of the leukemias . A lot of cancers occur due to the switching off of apoptosis genes. Apoptosis is programmed orderly cell death which may occur due to serious faults within the cell or simply that time has run out for that cell. In the absence of apoptosis rogue cells can multiply and cause chaos.
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