Is increased cell division sufficient to lead to uncontrolled growth?
These data indicated that a single mutation was capable of increasing cell proliferation, a necessity for cancer, but our hypothesis predicted that only cells containing all four hallmarks should have uncontrolled growth. In Figure 3, green color is an indication of the amount of telomeres in each cell lineage. At step 93, the Mutant 2 lineage was no longer capable of dividing, as indicated by the lack of telomeres (white color). The other lineages all appeared to have sufficient telomeres (green color) to allow further division. A scatter plot of the number of cells in each lineage at each step in the simulation (Figure 4) indicated that the number of cells in the Wildtype and Mutant 1 lineages had not increased since approximately step 50, suggesting their division had been limited by a process or action that occurred before their telomeres were depleted (Figure 1, solid blue line). In contrast, at step 93 Mutant 3 and Mutant 4 lineages were still proliferating (Figure 3). These line
