OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – Our bodies reproduce cells at a high rate and usually we don’t run into any problems. However, when cogs in the machine do malfunction during that process, things like birth defects and cancer come about. A scientist at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation is searching for the reasons those malfunctions happen.

“We’re not going to be able to fully understand why birth defects, infertility or cancer happens until we define what are all the parts to the machine,” Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation professor Dean Dawson said.

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Thanks to a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dawson is working to find and understand the parts of the “machine” of cell division.

“It’s to study different aspects of how cells move chromosomes when cells divide,” he said.

During our interview, Dawson said 100,000 cell divisions were happening in our body out of about 30 trillion cells total. Cells duplicate 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent, as they divide and multiply. Dawson described it like a deck of cards.

“It’s taking 46 cards, like a deck of cards, duplicating a set of cards, and then like a card dealer dealing them so that each of the two new cells gets 46 cards,” he said.

The cell usually gets it right to. However, there can be problems. Again, Dawson used the deck and divided the black and red cards into separate decks as chromosomes.

“The cell almost always gets it right. But sometimes can make a mistake,” he said as he dealt a black card into the red card pile. “Now we have a cell with a wrong chromosome.”

This becomes a major source of birth defects, cancer or even infertility. Why does this all happen? Well, that takes us back to square one, which is learning about the parts that make it all happen.

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“If you took your car to the mechanic because you felt like you weren’t getting enough fuel in the engine and the mechanic opened up the hood and said ‘we don’t understand the parts of the car that get fuel to the engine because no one has told us what those parts are yet,’” he said. “That’s kind of where we are with moving chromosomes.”

Dawson said they’re about halfway with learning all the different parts. They know some but definitely not all of them. He said there are theories about knowing which part of the cell is most likely to fail, but that’s as far as they’ve got.

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