Cell Cycle and Cancer Laboratory

For Discover Biology Lab

 

Cell Cycle Board Game

Learning objectives

• Familiarization with the cell cycle
• Understanding of cell cycle control via checkpoints
• Appreciation for the “Hallmarks of Cancer”
• Viewing cancer as a multistep, progressive disease
• Distinguishing the roles of oncogenes and tumor suppressors
• Creating and troubleshooting game design
• Probability and statistical thinking

Instructions for this lab:

1. Create a game board and the required cards
2. Create a simple set of rules for a game in which you move around the board
3. Play the game for 10-15 minutes using these rules
4. Write a half-page summary of the game with the following sections (options described below):
   1. Game objectives
   2. Card type summary
   3. Game rules
5. Establish three new rules and/or card types for your game
6. Repeat steps 3-5 twice
7. Write the “official rules” to your game – keep good rules, eliminate bad rules (You decide.)
8. “3-2-1”

Possible game objectives

• How do you win the game?
• How do you lose the game?
• Will your game have scoring?
• Will you keep track of how many of the hallmarks of cancer each player acquires?
• Is the objective to move around the game board as many or as few times as possible

Card types (required)

• Images of cells at each stage of the cell cycle (drawing only, no writing)
• “Hallmarks of Cancer”

Card types (optional)

• Therapies treating or preventing “Hallmarks of Cancer”
• Oncogenes and tumor suppressors mutations

Possible game rules

• Can you do something to prevent the “Hallmarks of Cancer” from accumulating?
• Movement around the board
  • Dice?
  • Candyland style card drawing?
  • Spinner?
  • Special cards that get you out of cell cycle checkpoint “traps”?

Steps of the cell cycle

1. Interphase
   1. G₁
   2. G₀ (optional)
   3. S
   4. G₂
2. Mitosis
   1. Prophase
   2. Metaphase
   3. Anaphase
   4. Telophase
   5. Cytokinesis
3. Checkpoints (Note: These stopping points may become nonexistent as cancer progresses.)
   1. G1 checkpoint
   2. G2 checkpoint
   3. M checkpoint

Hallmarks of cancer

1. Sustaining proliferative signaling
2. Evading growth suppressors
3. Avoiding immune destruction
4. Enabling replicative immortality
5. Tumor-promoting inflammation
6. Activating invasion and metastasis
7. Inducing angiogenesis
8. Genome stability and mutation
9. Resisting cell death
10. Deregulating cellular energetics

Cell cycle regulators (optional ideas to create a more complex game)

1. Cyclins
2. Cyclin-dependent kinases (Cdk)
3. Anaphase-promoting complex (APC)
4. Growth factors
5. Growth factor receptors
6. Oncogenes
7. Tumor suppressors