What are tumor suppressor proteins? The tumor suppressor proteins get rid of the bad DNA damage. So DNA damage is always bad. And when there's bad DNA, you want it to be eradicated, you want it to be fixed. But when those fixer proteins aren't around, that bad DNA continues to propagate and then you get mutations and that becomes potentially very dangerous. Are tumor suppressor proteins part of the immune system? So the tumor suppressor proteins are a natural sort of corrective agent. Whenever our DNA gets replicated, we always have errors in replication. But we have inherent parts of our body's replication apparatus that's designed to fix these errors. When you're replicating a double strand of DNA, you're getting billions of base pairs. And if you have a very, very small error rate, we're talking hundreds of thousands of errors. So those all need to be repaired appropriately or else you get propagation of continued errors and more and more mutations and that has unfortunate consequences.
HealthTree • February 18, 2022