News Finding: "We hope that we're at the beginning of a reawakening interest in the environment as an inducer of cancer," Balmain said.
Paper Finding: These patterns confirm previous results on carcinogen-specific mutations in Kras 6,9,10 .
News Context: The results are also consistent with observations that tumors arising in human organs that are most directly exposed to environmental carcinogens--the skin, gastrointestinal system, and lungs--are more prone to point mutations than more "protected" organs such as the brain, breast, and prostate gland. But only a very small number of the 25 mutational signatures revealed by NGS in human tumors so far have been convincingly tied to environmental exposures, Balmain said, so there is much to learn. "We hope that we're at the beginning of a reawakening interest in the environment as an inducer of cancer," Balmain said.
Paper Context: The vast majority of Kras mutations were validated by Sanger sequencing, although a small subset went undetected by this method ( Supplementary Table 1 ) despite confirmation by manual inspection of the alignments, suggesting a higher sensitivity afforded by WES. These patterns confirm previous results on carcinogen-specific mutations in Kras 6,9,10 . A transitions in driver genes in the adenocarcinoma samples, 15 of which passed ( Supplementary Table 8 ).