Reflections on the Presence of Human Cancer Genes in Primate Genomes

Cancer genes, including oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, are crucial subjects of study in human health. With advancements in nonhuman primate genome research, recent investigations have started to explore the relationship between human cancer genes and various primate species, implying possible links between cancer genes and nonhuman primate species. However, these findings are commonly limited to only a few primate species. Here, we investigate the distribution of 726 human cancer genes across 31 nonhuman primate species and 4 nonprimate species, comparing them with a randomly selected set of 339 other human genes. Overall, a higher ratio of cancer genes was found to have emerged before primate speciation compared with random human genes; however, this trend did not necessarily continue after primate speciation. Furthermore, our investigation into primate clades suggests that the absence of certain cancer genes in a clade may reflect recent emergence in other clades in which they exist, rather than elimination within the clades in which they are absent.