ADL 15 Mutation Story

I am a genetic mutation. I am a mutation that affects the AKT1 gene. This is the gene that regulates cell growth. My name is Proteus Syndrome. I am created during the early development of a body before birth . The parents of the human I am in do not have any affect on their child. I can also not be inherited. I am here by chance. I am a pretty uncommon mutation so people I affect can have a long or a short life. I affect the AKT1 by disrupting the cells ability to regulate its own growth. The cell then will divide at abnormally fast rates and will cause bones and tissue to grow bigger than they should be. Proteus Syndrome can have great affects on the human body. The affects will all be physical. People will see themselves have really big hands, heads, chests, legs. Pretty much any thing on your body can grow abnormally. I am not a genetic mutation that will cause you to die, I just affect your ways of life. There have only been a few hundred reported cases of me and I infect less than 1 in 1 million.

When I was born I thought I was just gonna be a normal gene that regulates cell growth. Of course I needed to be the messed up one from the bunch. I was the gene that was supposed to be responsible for regulating cell growth. I had one simple job to do and that was to sustain cell growth at a normal level. Now because of me I am not able to properly control cell growth, the person I am in will have oversized hands, feet, legs and many other body parts. They will still have a regular height growth level though. I feel really bad now because I don’t want any of this to happen and now I have messed up this persons life. At least this person will have the same life expectancy as normal people, that’s about the only thing they have in common. Other people all over the place will give them weird looks, make grossed out faces, and may even laugh at them. I wish I was normal because now when the person looks at themselves in the mirror they’ll just wish to be regular looking like all of the other kids. When people ask this person what happened to them they’ll just say “ I was unlucky”. They’ll have no one to blame for the inheritance of the gene. It’s just luck. I hope that it can live a somewhat normal life through everything I have done to them.

During this project I didn’t need to search up a lot of information, I found it all on one site. I searched up “How does Proteus Syndrome affect the cells” and just “Proteus Syndrome”. Another way i found some information was, that i watched some Youtube videos about Proteus Syndrome. I learned a lot about Proteus Syndrome during this project. One interesting thing I learned about proteus is that it comes by chance. I found the process of this challenge was quite simple, all you needed was a good question to search, and it should have been easy to find your information.