First Whole Cancer Genome Sequenced 115
dooling writes "A paper detailing the sequencing of the first human cancer genome will be published in the 6 November 2008 issue of Nature. This is not only the first cancer genome published, it is the first female genome as well. You can read the paper's abstract, DNA sequencing of a cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukaemia genome, or the story in Science News. This issue of Nature also has articles on the sequencing of the first African and Asian genomes. The sequencing in all three articles was done using the Illumina Genome Analyzer, one of the massively parallel, next-generation genome sequencing platforms."
Re:Population and cancer (Score:2, Informative)
Worldwide, cancer barely makes in to the to 10 causes of death. And the one type of cancer that does make it is caused primarily by smoking.
Re:Don't worry (Score:3, Informative)
Serously, despite wide and inexpensive availability of contraception, individual humans have very little control or foresight when it comes to controlling the number of offspring they have.
To the contrary. As people get wealthier, birth rate drops significantly. This is known as the "demographic transition [wikipedia.org]". Birth rate also decreases directly with education level, and with access to birth control techniques. (That latter would be, you'd think, duh no surprise, but nevertheless it was a surprise to sociologists).
So if you want to control population, make everybody rich, educated, and have access to birth control.
Re:That's nice but... (Score:2, Informative)
This strongly suggests that these are "passenger" mutations that were acquired during the life of the hematopoietic stem cell that later underwent clonal expansion.
Many of the patients remaining normal stem cells probably carry a few insignificant mutations here or there, but each of these is represent at such low frequency, that they cannot be detected in the absence of clonal expansion.
Second - there is no external or functional validation. Take these genes, mutate them, and put them into in vitro or mouse models of leukemia to see if they have any effect. Heck, just start by proving that these mutations occur at a higher frequency in coding regions than in non-coding regions of the genome. Or even show that all of these genes are actually expressed in leukemic cells.
Finally - mutations are not the only way to disrupt gene expression. Genes can be methylated, amplified, deleted, and post-transcriptionally down regulated (by miRNA for example). The genetic disaster that caused AML in this patients may have had more to do with these types of events (as is the case with a related, pre-leukemic conditon known as MDS).
So this is fascinating use of amazing technology, but also a first pass at analyzing a very complex data set. Many more cancer genomes will come in short order and we'll get a better sense of what this means.