Read the following directions CAREFULLY. You may use any resource material (except other student’s notes/exams) to formulate your answers to the questions on this examination. This includes your notes, your text, and reliable internet resources. Be sure that you are incorporating material from references in your own words and cited properly as to avoid plagiarism (citations should be at the end of each question, no questions should be without citations). If you get information from your textbook, you may simply cite textbook and the page number. You may NOT take quotes or diagrams from sources – you will need to create your own. You may NOT discuss these questions (or close representations) with any other human except for Dr. Wynn. Be sure that when studying for Exam 4 you don’t tempt yourself into cheating by talking to others about questions related to the final exam questions.
ALL TEXT MUST BE TYPED, but you may hand-draw figures as appropriate, but they must be clearly legible to be graded. Answers must be focused, clear, and concisely written.
The exam will be worth 75 points. Each question is worth 25 points, so be sure that your answer is of sufficient detail to be worth that many points (one paragraph answers will not be sufficient! I expect this exam to be a minimum of 2 pages.)
Question
1. You are a cancer geneticist looking into a putative tumor suppressor gene. You have found several cancer patients for whom you suspect have cancer because of this tumor suppressor gene. You come up with three processes that could have caused the cancer in these patients: mutation, transcriptional regulation and a DNA repair mechanism. For each process, explain specifically how each processes could cause cancer. When describing each process you should be specific (For example: don’t speak generally about repair, be specific about a type of repair and how it could lead to cancer.) Be thorough in each of your three descriptions and make sure to relate each process back to the cancer phenotype (having cancer as a result of something to do with this tumor suppressor gene).
