Essay On Cystic Fibrosis

Can you imagine having your lungs fill up with a sticky substance so its hard to breathe? This is what happens to patients with Cystic Fibrosis or CF. Along with the lungs CF affects the pancreas, digestive system, and other organs of the body. In normal lungs the mucus is thin and helps coat and protect the airways making it a lot easier to breathe. In Cystic Fibrosis the mucus that acts like a lubricant in and on our organs turns very thick and sticky. This makes the air ducts and the tubes in CF patients get clogged, making it harder to breathe. Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic disease that is passed down from parent to the child. Even if you carry the gene for Cystic Fibrosis that doesn’t mean you have it just like any other genetic disease. Cystic Fibrosis is a recessive sex-linked trait, meaning you have to have 2 of the recessive alleles to have CF. The pattern that CF is inherited by is called the autosomal recessive pattern. This is when the 2 copies (1 from mom and 1 from dad) of the gene have the …show more content…
This gene has the challenging job of giving the instructions for making a protein called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein. This protein produces the mucus, sweat, tears, saliva and digestive enzymes in our bodies. It also acts like a tunnel to bring the negatively charged ion particle- chloride into and out of the cell. The movement of the chloride helps maintain the making of thin and easy moving mucus. In most Cystic Fibrosis cases there are mutations where amino acids are changed or deleted. For example, the most found mutation goes by the name of delta F508. In this mutation one amino acid gets deleted, on the 508th place on the CFTR protein, after this it breaks down and is never able to get to the membrane to bring the chloride ions. This is one of many mutations that may cause cystic