Venus care
tos20061016
The Consensus Coding Sequences of Human Breast and Colorectal Cancers
Tobias Sjöblom, et al. Science 314, 268–274 (2006). doi: 10.1126/science.1133427 | CrossRef
ASSS :: online 20060908 Printed 20061013
Venus care
Venus
A detail of Birth of Venus (1485-1486), Sandro BOTTICELLI
Uffizi Gallery, Firenze, Italy
Original image source: Web Gallery of Art
Taking effect a radical cure of human cancers is the biggest challenge of cell biology. Although it's generally accepted that human cancer is a genetic disease caused by genes' mutations or heredity, however, we often feel despondent because the diagnostic and therapeutic measures are often impotent and about 90% of tumor drugs fail in patients now. The reason should be that the molecular processes or pathways underlying tumorigenesis are much more than expected and the mutations are far different from tumor to tumor, reported Tobias Sjöblom and colleagues [ 1 ]. The team presented their comprehensive search by sequencing cancer cell genome with two common tumor types, breast and colorectal cancers; together they account for ~2.2 million cancer diagnoses (20% of the total) and ~940,000 cancer deaths each year (14% of the total) [ 2 ].
With the determination of the human genome sequence and recent improvements in sequencing and bioinformatic approaches, the coding and adjacent noncoding regions of 13,023 CCDS genes [ 3 ], which represent the most highly curated gene set currently available, were sequenced in 11 colorectal and 11 breast cancers. Of 90% of 13,023 evaluated successfully, they found that 1149 were mutated, 236 were validated, and 189 were cancer genes (CAN genes). Among these, the CAN genes were most likely to have been subjected to mutational selection during tumorigenesis. Moreover, although some CAN genes are familiar such as the tumor-suppressor gene p53, most had never been found mutated in cancer before.They ultimately found that there are 105 and 81 mutant genes (average 93) in the typical breast or colorectal cancer, respectively. Individual breast cancers examined in the discovery screen harbored an average of 12 (range 4 to 23) mutant CAN genes, whereas the average number of CAN genes in colorectal cancers was 9 (range 3 to 18). Notably, each cancer specimen of a given tumor type carried its own distinct CAN-gene mutational signature, as no cancer had more than six mutant CAN genes in common with any other cancer, said the authors. In addition to these CAN genes, they also noted that there were other mutated CCDS genes that were likely to have been selected for during tumorigenesis but were not altered at a frequency high enough to warrant confidence in their interpretation.
Aside from its importance in the description of two common tumor types, breast and colorectal cancers, this groundbreaking study surely extends our understanding of underlying evolution of human tumors due to complex pathways of genes' mutations. Beyond science, it's love for every lady and her family. ♦
* Lin Pu is in the Physics Department of Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, CHINA.
References
1 | Tobias Sjöblom, Siân Jones, Laura D. Wood, D. Williams Parsons, Jimmy Lin, Thomas D. Barber, Diana Mandelker, Rebecca J. Leary, Janine Ptak, Natalie Silliman, Steve Szabo, Phillip Buckhaults, Christopher Farrell, Paul Meeh, Sanford D. Markowitz, Joseph Willis, Dawn Dawson, James K. V. Willson, Adi F. Gazdar, James Hartigan, Leo Wu, Changsheng Liu, Giovanni Parmigiani, Ben Ho Park, Kurtis E. Bachman, Nickolas Papadopoulos, Bert Vogelstein, Kenneth W. Kinzler, and Victor E. Velculescu. |
| 2 | D. M. Parkin, F. Bray, J. Ferlay, P. Pisani, CA Cancer J. Clin. 55, 74 (2005). Free Full | Free PDF |
| 3 | Consensus Coding Sequences: CCDS Database. Link: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CCDS |
Citation
L. PU
Lin PU, Venus care. Scidea Sketch 1 (1), ss20061013a1 (2007).
♦ doi: 10.3128/ss20061013a1 | Scidea :: Abs . Full | CrossRef
♦ Scidea Sketch :: ISSN: 1992 - 8548