| dc.description.abstract | In cancer patients, primary tumors can inhibit the proliferation of distant metastasized tumor cells. The subsequent removal of the primary tumor causes the metastasized tumor cells to regain the ability to proliferate. Secreted factors that inhibit the proliferation of the cells that secrete the factor are called chalones, and while they were originally discovered as a way for tissue size to be regulated or as a method to control population densities of specific types of cells, chalones could also be used to control tumor cell proliferation and thus are important to this field of study. However, their mechanisms for limiting proliferation are still poorly understood. A new possible chalone, inorganic polyphosphate, has been identified in the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum, a haploid, eukaryotic social amoeba that has already been used to identify two other factors that act as chalones. To identify the components of this new chalone’s signal transduction pathway, procedures such as restriction-enzyme-mediated insertional (REMI) mutagenesis, inverse PCR, and using homologous recombination to create null mutations are being implemented. | en |
