Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2016
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Tuesday, Feb 16, 2016
Time: 4:00PM
Location: LCB 219
Tuesday
Ignacio Rodriguez-Brenes
UC Irvine
Title |
Replicative senescence as a tumor suppressor |
Abstract |
Normal somatic cells lose the ability to divide after a limited number of cell divisions. This phenomenon, known as replicative senescence, is an important barrier to tumor progression. Essentially all human cancers acquire mechanisms that allow them to escape replicative senescence, most often through high levels of expression of the enzyme telomerase. In this talk we will discuss mathematical models that quantify the protection offered by replicative senescence as a tumor suppressor mechanism. We will also discuss the emergence of mutants that escape replicative senescence and present results on the mean, variance, distribution, and asymptotic behavior of the mutant population. These results introduce the concept of incorporating replicative limits as part of the Luria-Delbrück mutational framework. We end by discussing applications to anti-telomerase cancer therapies. |
Applied Mathematics