Essay On The Cell Cycle

David Garcia

Cell Cycle

Period 2

Cells, cells make up every living organism which makes up this world, and those cells each have a function. The functions and purposes of each cell are intended to help the organism which the cells make up to survive in their environment. Cells have a life cycle which causes them to live and die, replicate and repeat the cycle. There are different parts to the cell's life cycle. Stages in which the cell grows, replicates, and go into their functional stage which is where they carry out with their normal processes. There are cell checkpoints in part of the cell cycle in which the cell decides whether or not to move forward into cell division. The cell division is a very important part of the cell cycle since that is how humans grow, recover and survive in the world.

The checkpoints in which a cell has to go through does not kill the unhealthy cell instead it simply choose whether the cell can move forward or not. Cancer cells form when a mutation in the DNA happens, this is caused when the replication of the genes coded into the cell are irregular and cause the cell to divide; or go into the mitosis phase for too much of its lifetime. Cancer cells are not affected by the checkpoints in each of the phases of the cycle since they behave the same way normal cells would, except they just divide too rapidly. Unlike normal cells which need nutrients and proteins to grow, cancer do not need those proteins and nutrients in order to grow and divide. Cancer cells ignore the signals in the checkpoints that tell them to stop dividing. Different types of cancers can be treated with treatments such as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy. Chemotherapy being one of the most common ones, works in the way in which it kills the fast growing cells in the human body. It targets the cells which are duplicating too fast. In some cases the chemotherapy