Passenger hotspot mutations in cancer driven by APOBEC3A and mesoscale genomic features

The DNA of cancer cells contains many mutations. A few of these mutations are called "driver mutations" because they were responsible for changing the behavior of the cells to make them multiply out of control and form a tumor. But the vast majority of mutations in the cell had no effect and are just "along for the ride"—these are called "passenger mutations". Telling driver mutations apart from the far more numerous passenger mutations can be very challenging. One commonly used approach is to look for exactly the same mutation occurring in many different patients' cancers. This "recurrence" approach has been very successful over the past decade at identifying cancer driver genes and mutations. However, it assumes that every recurrent mutation ("mutation hotspot") is a driver hotspot. In this new paper published this week in Science, MGH researchers Dr. Lee Zou and Dr. Michael Lawrence took a new critical look at this assumption.

Read more about this exciting new research here.