Cancer Biology: Oncogenes, Tumour Suppressors, and Multistep Carcinogenesis
Students will investigate the causes of climate change, focusing on the greenhouse effect and human activities, and its biological impacts.
Key Questions
- Explain how gain-of-function mutations in proto-oncogenes and loss-of-function mutations in tumour suppressor genes disrupt normal cell cycle control, applying the two-hit hypothesis to explain the recessive nature of tumour suppressor loss at the cellular level.
- Analyse the hallmarks of cancer — sustained proliferative signalling, evasion of apoptosis, induction of angiogenesis, and activation of invasion and metastasis — as consequences of cumulative somatic mutations, evaluating how each hallmark represents a targetable vulnerability.
- Evaluate the clonal selection model of tumour progression, explaining how successive rounds of mutation and natural selection within a growing tumour drive the stepwise acquisition of increasingly malignant phenotypes.
MOE Syllabus Outcomes
Suggested Methodologies
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