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Cancer is a horrible disease that many people have died from over the years because no one has found a cure yet, though the quickest way to finding one is by actually understanding the cells and what exactly causes them to spread through the human body and kill them. Now, there are many different types of cancer, but the one that I am going to look at and the one that most people know, are tumor cells, which have the quickest moving rate. The way that malignant tumor cells work is that they break off from the main cell (the main cancerous region) and then migrate using something called filopods, which are basically extensions of themselves, to move themselves around and spread throughout the body. The way the filopods work is that they reach out, adhere themselves onto a medium (which could be anything from glass to the space around them which is known as the extracellular matrix, or ECM), and then basically pull the rest of themselves up, like an inch worm. As they move, they’re body begins to spread out from a spherical shape to a more blob-like shape that takes up even more room. But what kills most people is the rate at which the cells grow and migrate because they’re trying to take as much space as possible because in that way, they’re like humans: If something burns, you move your hand away from it, but if something feels cool enough to touch, you move your hand towards it. The same thing applies to cancer cells; there is something in the human body that causes them to continue spreading. But even though cancer cells are so dangerous, they’re extremely fragile at the same time; they have to have a certain sterile environment in order to live. Since temperature is usually key into most sterile environments, I want to see what changing the temperature will do to the migration rate and adhesiveness of the cell, and see if a warmer or cooler temperature might help slow down the cells migration.
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