What are N-myc and tumor suppressor genes?
The “N” that you see before the “myc”, means that it is a “normal” oncogene (it is not found to mutate, such as those oncogenes that start with C, like C-myc). With N-myc, the change is amplification. Tumor suppressor genes control protooncogenes. You’ve probably been reading a lot about p53 in the newspapers this past year. The job of the p53 gene is to control cell division in cells that have damaged DNA. It is supposed to stop these cells from dividing until the damaged DNA can be repaired. These damaged cells can be cancerous, so that’s one reason why the gene is so important. Some people have mutations of this tumor suppressing gene, and it has been implicated in many different forms of cancer. So, we’ve got two different things we’re looking at here. There are the protooncogenes (for example N-myc which codes for a protein that promotes cell division), and we have tumor suppressor genes (for example the p53 gene product), which code for proteins that inhibit cell division. It is
