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To catalog the genetic changes that occur during tumorigenesis, researchers examined mutations in 140 breast and colorectal carcinomas. They analyzed the sequences of 20,857 transcripts from 18,191 human genes.
The results suggested that, in a given individual tumor, fewer than 15 genes (driver genes) are responsible for the initiation or maintenance of the tumor, and mutations in approximately 80 genes are “harmless” and may be byproducts of differences in gene mutability, bottlenecks in cell proliferation, the number of cell populations in a tumor, and previous treatments. Looking at the distribution of mutated genes in different cancers of the same type, the authors note gene “mountains,” areas of heightened mutational frequency (e.g., p5…