Somatic mutations in more than 260 genes have been identified from studies of human cancers, and a huge amount of data has been generated from this work. Rather than researchers spending hours carrying out literature searches or visiting various specialist databases, a single, comprehensive source of information on cancer-related somatic mutations would clearly be a good thing. In response to this need, the Cancer Genome Project, based at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, launched a new web site on 4 February 2004. COSMIC (Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer) will bring this data together in one accessible, freely available resource.
COSMIC allows researchers to select their gene of interest and displays a map of where mutations occur in the amino-acid sequence. It also gives structural and functional information on protein domains and provides a list of samples containing each mutation, as well as a comprehensive list of publications for each altered site. Information can alternatively be accessed starting with tissue type, so that data is displayed for the genes that are mutated in each tissue. Data of interest can be exported in several useful formats, including text, HTML and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
The COSMIC web site will eventually contain data on all genes that are associated with human cancer. So far, details for four of these — BRAF, HRAS, KRAS2 and NRAS — have been catalogued. This already provides data on 57,444 tumours and 10,647 mutations, giving an idea of the huge amount of information this project will eventually bring together.
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Flintoft, L. COSMIC collection. Nat Rev Cancer 4, 170 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc1314
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc1314
