P53 Essay

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The article begins by stating that the tumor suppressor p53 has great importance in the prevention of cancer growth and expansion. Although cancer is the most spoken about topic and p53’s significance against it, p53 also has a hand in ischemia, neurodegeneration, and ageing. While this tumor suppressor seems to be very busy it also regulates the repair of DNA and death of the cell, just to name a few. The activity of p53 can be seen when binding to the DNA at target sequences for transcription. It was pointed out that the doings of p53 are not designated to the nucleus such as other transcription factors as determined over time. Further mentioned in the introduction is a statement that lists this as the most studied mechanism while also related to the material covered in class is apoptosis. P53 inducts apoptosis in the by intrinsic mitochondria-mediated pathway, also transcriptionally through pro-apoptotic parts of the pathway, and in a transcription–independent way which has been recently been looked further into. As if the roles above were not plentiful enough cytoplasmic p53 is also thought to influence autophagy, movement of vesicles, signal transduction, cell metabolism and possibly stem cell expansion, but all are truly determined. Towards the end of the introductory section the authors state that there are still many mechanisms of cytoplasmic p53’s activation leading to apoptosis that are uncertain as well as some p53 missense mutants that lead to oncogenesis. The authors express that the article mainly will speak about the proper or improper activities performed by p53 on the mechanism in the cytoplasm while also looking for areas where beneficial treatments may be used.
While much is unknown regarding the cytoplasmic lo...

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...eve that this would be the area I would spend ample time, continually testing.
A portion of this paper caught my curiosity found in the section relating cytoplasmic p53 and pathophysiology in which they brought up material that was covered in the class room. This related to the activation of caspase-3 that was dependent upon p53. Although also found in the article is the relation of caspase-3 with being activated from cytochrome-c attachment to Apaf-1 forming an apoptosome leading to apoptosis, which was displayed on a diagram from class. It is also remarkable that a review summary still contains so much complexity from many sources when previously examining primary source articles that only contain material coming from one study alone. Overall the article was very interesting to review and gives a better understanding of the many studies that are being conducted.

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