Scientists in the U.S. have identified nearly 200 mutations in noncoding DNA that play functional roles in different cancers. Most of the somatic expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) appear to impact on a set of core pathways, which makes it possible to classify tumors into pathways-based subtypes, suggest the researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Stanford University School of Medicine. “Most cancer-related mutations occur in regions of the genome outside of genes, but there are so incredibly many of them that it's hard to know which are actually relevant and which are merely noise," says senior author Trey Ideker, Ph.D., professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. "Here for the first time we found about 200 mutations in noncoding DNA that are functional in cancer—and that's about 199 more than we knew before." The findings indicate that the ...
Original Article: Cancer Can Be Driven By Noncoding DNA Mutations