Cancer Genes

In a recent paper by Lawrence et al in Nature the authors present a structured collection of genes elated to a selection of cancers. We summarize them above. The details are in the paper.

The details shown above are another way to view the results. This is interesting in that it demonstrates steps in cancer formation, proliferation, and metastasis. Although the paper does present a mass of unconnected genetic markers, one suspects that the spatio-temporal characteristic can be somewhat readily ascertained.

As the authors conclude:


Although a few cancer genes are mutated in a high proportion of tumours of a given type (>20%), most are mutated at intermediate frequencies (2-20%). To explore the feasibility of creating a comprehensive catalogue of cancer genes, we analysed somatic point mutations in exome sequences from 4,742 human cancers and their matched normal-tissue samples across 21 cancer types. We found that large-scale genomic analysis can identify nearly all known cancer genes in these tumour types. Our analysis also identified 33 genes that were not previously known to be significantly mutated in cancer, including genes related to proliferation, apoptosis, genome stability, chromatin regulation, immune evasion, RNA processing and protein homeostasis. Down-sampling analysis indicates that larger sample sizes will reveal many more genes mutated at clinically important frequencies.

It is worth following this in some detail.