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To gain insight into the driving forces behind cancer and discover potentially life-saving drugs, researchers have tried numerous strategies for identifying somatic mutations in tumors. Recent technological advances make systematic sequencing of the entire cancer genome possible. At the Wellcome Center, a leading group in cancer genetics recently announced the complete genomic sequence of a single melanoma. COLO-829 is a cell line derived from a metastasis of a malignant melanoma in a 43-year-old man.
This single sample harbored 33,345 somatic base substitutions; the researchers subjected a small subset to secondary confirmation and found a 3% false-positive rate. Many of the suspected 680 small deletions and 303 small insertions could not b…