Genetics · Module 17 · Developmental and cancer genetics

Developmental and Cancer Genetics Lab

Change bicoid dose and mutate patterning genes to watch stripes and segments shift; let a tissue patch collect oncogene, tumor suppressor and caretaker hits and see clones expand and age of onset change; practise majors level problems with animated worked solutions; sort genes; and work through real cases. Nothing here is graded.

Part 1: Patterning and Tumor Benches

Colours: Bicoid blue, Nanos orange, hunchback purple, Krüppel green, knirps gold, giant pink; eve stripes red, ftz blue, engrailed green, wingless gold. Segment colours show Hox identity. Tumor bench: beige 0 hits through dark purple 5 hits.

Simplifications: the fly bench is a rule based model of the textbook cascade, not a reaction-diffusion simulation. Bicoid fates read one threshold on an exponential gradient (length constant 15% of egg length), and posterior fates are compressed when anterior ones expand. Segment deletions follow the textbook mutant phenotypes at the level of whole segments (real pair rule and segment polarity defects remove parasegment-sized or partial units). The tumor patch uses exaggerated mutation rates, a simple neighbour-replacement model and three driver genes (APC and TP53 need two hits, KRAS one; mismatch repair loss multiplies the mutation rate). The age of onset curve comes from a separate cohort model calibrated so that about 4 to 5 percent of people with no inherited hit develop colorectal cancer by 85; real risks vary by gene, variant and screening.