Constellation in the chaos of cancer chromosomes
Yet a century after Boveri, scientists still aren’t exactly sure if aneuploidy and other kinds of related chromosomal mayhem drive tumorigenesis or if they are simple bystanders. An answer to this longstanding conundrum has now emerged from a new computational study by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Stephen J. Elledge and colleagues at Harvard Medical School who present evidence that aneuploidy patterns of chromosome deletion or amplification that are recurrent among tumors actually represent a driving force during tumor evolution and are very frequent in cancer. Elledge’s study, published October 31, 2013 in the journal Cell, looked at sequencing data from 8,200 tumors of all types, comprising a total of 1.2 million mutations. …