{"id":197599,"date":"2024-10-13T13:24:16","date_gmt":"2024-10-13T18:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/new-study-challenges-longstanding-assumption-about-the-cause-of-the-genomes-most-common-mutation"},"modified":"2024-10-13T13:24:16","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T18:24:16","slug":"new-study-challenges-longstanding-assumption-about-the-cause-of-the-genomes-most-common-mutation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/new-study-challenges-longstanding-assumption-about-the-cause-of-the-genomes-most-common-mutation","title":{"rendered":"New study challenges longstanding assumption about the cause of the genome\u2019s most common mutation"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has punctured a longstanding assumption about the source of the most common type of DNA mutation seen in the genome\u2014one that contributes to many genetic diseases, including cancer.<\/p>\n

Led by Ludwig Oxford Leadership Fellow Marketa Tomkova, postdoc Michael McClellan, Assistant Member Benjamin Schuster-B\u00f6ckler and Associate Investigator Skirmantas Kriaucionis, the study has implications not only for basic cancer biology but also for such things as assessments of carcinogenic risk associated with environmental factors and our understanding of the emergence of drug resistance during cancer therapy<\/a>. Its findings are reported<\/a> in the current issue of Nature Genetics.<\/p>\n

The mutation in question\u2014in which cytosine \u00a9, one of the four bases of DNA that spell out our genes, is erroneously switched to thymine (T)\u2014was thought to be primarily the result of a spontaneous chemical reaction with water. This reaction, deamination, is about twice as likely to happen when a cytosine is chemically tagged by the addition of a molecule known as a methyl group<\/a> to create 5-methylcytosine, which occurs in DNA at so-called \u201cCpG\u201d positions, where C is followed by the base guanine (G).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has punctured a longstanding assumption about the source of the most common type of DNA mutation seen in the genome\u2014one that contributes to many genetic diseases, including cancer. Led by Ludwig Oxford Leadership Fellow Marketa Tomkova, postdoc Michael McClellan, Assistant Member Benjamin Schuster-B\u00f6ckler and Associate Investigator Skirmantas Kriaucionis, the study [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}