Mutational Analysis of the Tyrosine Kinome in Colorectal Cancers

Abstract

Tyrosine kinases (TKs) are central regulators of signaling pathways that control differentiation, transcription, cell cycle progression, apoptosis, motility, and invasion (1). Although a few TK genes have been shown to be mutationally altered in specific human cancers (1), it is not known how many or how often members of the TK gene family are altered in any particular cancer type. In this study, we have used high-throughput sequencing technologies and bioinformatics from the human genome project to address this question. A recent analysis organized the protein kinase complement of the human genome (the “kinome”) into a dendrogram containing nine broad groups of genes (2). We selected one major branch of this dendrogram, containing three of the nine major groups, for mutational analysis.