Utilizing protein structure to identify non-random somatic mutations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Human cancer is caused by the accumulation of somatic mutations in tumor suppressors and oncogenes within the genome. In the case of oncogenes, recent theory suggests that there are only a few key "driver" mutations responsible for tumorigenesis. As there have been significant pharmacological successes in developing drugs that treat cancers that carry these driver mutations, several methods that rely on mutational clustering have been developed to identify them. However, these methods consider proteins as a single strand without taking their spatial structures into account. We propose an extension to current methodology that incorporates protein tertiary structure in order to increase our power when identifying mutation clustering.

Results

We have developed iPAC (

SUBMITTER: Ryslik GA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3691676 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature