Truncated Travel

The good news is that our cells are guarded by tumour suppressor proteins, which look for DNA damage and initiate any necessary repairs. But, if the genes coding for these proteins become mutated, cells containing damaged DNA are then able to grow and replicate out of control. In human cancers, one such gene called p53 is frequently mutated. Researchers have recently found mutations that cause certain shortened versions of the p53 protein to be produced – called truncating mutations – are enough to prevent the tumour suppressing function. Cells with truncated p53 also undergo a structural change (pictured on the right), compared to those with the full-length counterpart (left-hand side). These structural changes ultimately allowed cancerous cells to break away from the tissue, and travel and spread to other tissues in the body.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image adapted from work by Nitin H Shirole and colleagues
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, October 2016