New technique catalogs lymphoma-linked genetic variations
Wednesday, December 26, 2012 - 16:00
in Biology & Nature
As anyone familiar with the X-Men knows, mutants can be either very good or very bad — or somewhere in between. The same appears true within cancer cells, which may harbor hundreds of mutations that set them apart from other cells in the body; the scientific challenge has been to figure out which mutations are culprits and which are innocent bystanders. Now, researchers have devised a novel approach to sorting them out: they generated random mutations in a gene associated with lymphoma, tested the proteins produced by the genes to see how they performed, and generated a catalog of mutants with cancer-causing potential.