What effects do different types of mutations have on cell growth and division?
We were interested in determining whether all mutations have deleterious effects on a cell’s ability to grow and divide (proliferate). Our hypothesis was that it was possible to elicit different effects on proliferation based upon the type of mutation introduced into the cell. To test our hypothesis we designed an experiment to measure the amount of cell proliferation (measured by the total number of cells in the population) for a normal cell compared with five distinct mutant cell lineages. Each of the mutant cell lineages contained a different type of mutation, but all mutations were in the Mitogen Receptor. The particular mutations and how they were implemented in the virtual cells can be seen in the Methods section.
