In general, one single mutation won’t give you cancer. You need some mutations on specific genes to develop it. Some of this mutations may come with the gene set you inherited from your parents, and all your body cells get this mutation. Other mutations develop during your lifetime by different reasons, but this mutations are not present on every cell your body have, but only on some of them. Everyday you get mutations on your DNA, but most of the cells that get these mutations get eliminated by the immune system. The problem is when you get the set of mutations needed for a cell to divide uncontrollably, and the immune system does not detect this. Cancer cells are more susceptibles to certain treatments that regular cells, so you can use these treatments to eliminate them. If you eliminate all cancer cells, you are cancer free, if not, you might get cancer again. People that inherit mutations from their parent genes, are also more susceptible to get cancer again, as they need fewer other mutations in their cells to develop it.

Probably there are some other mechanisms involved, but one regulation is the depletion of free NAD+. If you don’t have any oxigen to finally receive the electrons made on glicolisis - Krebs cycle, all NAD+ gets converted to NADH, and the reactions that requiere free NAD+ just stop. To avoid all these things, you can convert piruvate to lactic acid (lactic fermentation). This reaction uses one NADH, and converts it to NAD+ again, so that the glicolisis - lactic fermentation can continue. This reaction takes place in the cell cytoplasm, not on the mitochondria, separating in from other processes.

After the human genome project, and with the development of new sequencing techniques (next generation sequencing) new projects have arised. 1000 genomes was one of the first ones, that was latter expanded to 2500. Other projects appeared from then, like the 100.000 genomes project, and the Simons genomic diversity project.

Great response, just to add that biologically, some scientists think that RNA arised before DNA, as short sequences, which contained information as well as others with biological activities, called ribozymes.

In general, sequencing a complete transcript nowadays is easy using next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques. Just retro transcribe, make the cDNA library, add the adaptors (depending on which sequencing technique are you using) and sequence. On the other hand, if you want to know full protein expression, that’s kind of hard. The most used thechnique to determine different protein levels are based on the use of antibodies. So for that you should have a support whith thousands of different antibodies detecting each one a different protein to determine translational levels from RNA. This is way more expensive than transcriptics. A lot of people tend to suppose that more RNA means more protein. That’s one approach, but studies have revealed that translational control may be even more important than transcriptional control over the final amount of protein you got. So yes, making a proteomics full study would be a much better idea, but way more expensive as well. Ideally, you should also study Interactome, but as I know, there is no a “massive interactome” protocol.

Probably genetics it’s the most important thing here, but you could probably not discard ambient effects, in this case, the surrogate mother “ambient”. I don’t really know if this have been extensively studied, but a surrogate mother may contribute with hormones, factors or other active molecules that may at the end affect the size of the offspring. In genetics there is a law, that says that the phenotype is the sum of the genotype + the ambient. Probably this is one of such cases.

Hi, just here to make some corrections. As I understand, yes, there are some viruses that reverse transcribe and then integrate into the host DNA, this is a really good example of virus that “hide” from the immune system. They usually activate or make more damage when the infected person goes trough a period of immune system weakness. This kind of viruses are called retroviruses. HPV is not a retrovirus, and it uses a different hiding strategy. This virus can “hide” from the immune system getting kind of dormant in the brain cells. When your immune system is weak, it activates again. Viruses are not really considered living organisms (well, it depends who you ask) but they pretty much follow evolution rules, just that much faster, because of the type of molecule they use as genetic code (RNA virus genomes are much less stable than DNA viruses) and because generally, the polymerase protein they use to make new copies of the genome lacks what is called “proofreading” activity, making them commit more “mistakes” when copying their genome. So when you get virus multiplied, you don’t have millions of copies of the exact same virus, but you got millions of viruses that are really similar, but not exactly the same. Some of this mutations makes some of these new viruses more resistant to certain actions of the immune system, so the original virus may get eliminated, but the mutated virus don’t. This process repeats multiple times, so your immune system constantly recognizes and find new ways to fight the new variants, but the new variants keep appearing all the time. At the end, who wins this battle and the time it takes all this to happen gets you the final result. Maybe someone can contribute more on this issue, or maybe correct something, but that is pretty much what I know. Hope I helped you.

Edit: someone make me notice, HPV does not infect brain cells, I was confusing it with HSV-1.