NEWS & MEDIA

Underdog Enzyme Likely Responsible for Mutations in Most Cancers

A previously overlooked enzyme called APOBEC3A is linked to the most prevalent mutational signatures in cancer cell lines, a study finds.

Jul 28, 2022

Major mutation pattern in cancer occurs in bursts
News article by the Communications Team,

7 Mar 2019
New resources could help understand the origins of cancer

Researchers have created a huge resource for investigating the biological mechanisms that cause cancer. The scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators identified which patterns of DNA damage – mutational fingerprints that represent the origins of cancer – were present in over a thousand human cancer cell lines. They also revealed that a major mutation pattern found in human cancer, previously linked to a virus-fighting immune response, occurred in bursts in cancer cell lines with long periods of silence in between, but the cause of these mutational bursts remains mysterious.

Switching APOBEC mutation signatures
Darren J. Burgess
Nature Reviews Genetics volume 20, page253 (2019)

CANCER GENOMICS

Accumulating evidence from cancer sequencing studies shows that endogenous and exogenous mutagenic processes leave diverse signatures within cancer genomes. Two recent studies report substantial temporal and spatial variability in mutagenic signatures caused by APOBEC cytidine deaminases.

Dr Mia Petljak, Postdoctoral Associate at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, spoke at Mutographs 2019 about mutational signatures of APOBEC-associated (apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme, catalytic polypeptide-like) mutagenesis in human cancer. #Mutographs2019, the annual meeting of the Mutographs project, was held on 11-12 July 2019 at IARC, Lyon, France. 

Find out more about IARC: www.iarc.fr