Hockemeyer and his UC Berkeley colleagues, in collaboration with dermatopathologist Boris Bastian and his colleagues at UCSF, found that immortalization is a two-step process, driven initially by a mutation that turns telomerase on, but at a very low level.
After gathering the world's largest sample collection for feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), they uncovered the holy grail of a 30-year quest for the mutation that turns it fatal.
The neurons that die off in Huntington's disease sufferers are done in by a genetic mutation that turns a good protein bad.
She has produced 450 lines of Drosophila, each with a gene mutation that turns off production of a necessary protein at high temperatures.
The new analysis, being published Friday in the journal Science, detected extremely rare and unknown mutations that turned up three to four times as often in people with schizophrenia as in those without it.
Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren't being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.
A competing theory is that people, along with the rest of the earth's animals and plants, evolved over billions of years, beginning as extremely simple organisms and, via the accumulation of the tiny fraction of random mutations that turn out to be useful, developing into more complex ones.
Sure enough, when the researchers analyzed these body fluids, they found the same characteristic mutations as those that turned up in the mitochondria from tumor tissues.
The mutation steps that turn a cell into a cancer cell, that's actually a really complicated transformation that I could explore in greater depth.
Roughly 65% of the wild carp, which mostly descended from the original mirror carp released into the wild, were fully scaled, despite all still carrying the genetic mutation that originally turned their ancestors into mirror carp.
