May be a general question; sometimes stupidity too....
For example, cancer is caused by somatic mutation in the genome. And treatment has been given to the patient. So what is the chance of change in the somatic mutation if cancer got cured?
Somatic mutations are permanent unless altered by genome editing. If a particular treatment eliminates/kills off all cells harboring the particular mutation that lead to the malignant phenotype then you're not really fixing the mutation.
it is possible to revert a mutation, but the process is really rare. One example is homologous recombination, another example can happen if the mutated base gets mutated again to a normal genotype (albeit this process may never occur due to low chances). But this "reverting" of the mutation will only happen in one specific cell! What happens in cancer is that a cell containing a specific mutation proliferates, so there is now a big population of cells harboring the same mutation. No cancer can be reverted by the process that you asked, because it would have to happen in all cells in a short span of time. To get rid of the mutation you would need genetic engineering (like CRISPR of ZINC-finger proteins) or to simply kill all the cells that are mutated.
Sorry. I should have been clearer. My comment about somatic mutations being permanent without editing was not meant to be considered in the context of cancer treatment...just that these types of mutations are permanent. From a cellular standpoint, there is no way for a cell to detect the presence of a mutation--this is very different from DNA damage which can be sensed and repaired (homologous recombination, as you correctly point out, is one mechanism).
Thank you, Gabriel Gama and Nathanael Pruett for your valuable answers
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