Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Formic Acid from Carbon Dioxide on Nanolayered Electrocatalyst

Formic acid is electrochemically generated from carbon dioxide (CO2) on nanolayered lead (Pb) electrode. Stepwise potential deposition method is applied to prepare nanostructured Pb, composed of particles and platelets with hexagonal and cubic crystallinities. Their electrocatalytic activities in an electroreduction of CO2 are compared. We observed higher faradaic efficiencies of 94.1% on a cubic Pb surface than that of polycrystalline Pb smooth films (52.3%) at 278 K. Analyzing the mass changes of the electrodes by electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance, the mechanistic origin of CO2 reduction is studied, and the indirect reduction of CO2 via Had atoms might be more reasonable than the direct electron transfer of CO2 molecules