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Cancer and genomics

P A Futreal1, A Kasprzyk, E Birney

  • 1Cancer Genome Project, Sanger Centre, Cambridge, UK.

Nature
|March 10, 2001
PubMed

Insights

Researchers sought novel cancer-causing genes by analyzing human genome sequences. The study found that detecting oncogenic fusion genes in cancer cells is unreliable due to high false positive rates and poor DNA quality.

Area of Science:

  • Genomics
  • Cancer Research
  • Molecular Biology

Background:

  • Identifying genes driving oncogenesis is crucial for cancer research.
  • Previous efforts focused on finding novel tumor suppressor genes by comparing protein sequences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate novel methods for identifying cancer-causing genes.
  • To assess the feasibility of detecting oncogenic sequence changes directly in cancer genomes.

Main Methods:

  • Searched the human genome sequence for paralogues of known tumor suppressor genes.
  • Compared cancer genome sequences against the draft human genome to detect oncogenic sequence changes.
  • Analyzed for chimaeric transcripts indicative of oncogenic fusion genes.

Main Results:

  • No novel tumor suppressor genes were identified through protein sequence comparison.
  • Chimaeric transcripts were detected in both normal and neoplastic tissues, indicating significant false positives.
  • The study highlighted limitations in the quantity and quality of available cancer cell DNA sequences.

Conclusions:

  • Directly searching for oncogenic sequence changes in cancer genomes using current methods is unreliable.
  • The low quality and limited quantity of cancer DNA sequences pose significant challenges for identifying cancer-driving genes.
  • Further advancements in DNA sequencing technology and data analysis are needed for accurate cancer gene discovery.

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