title: COSMIC (the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer): a resource to investigate acquired mutations in human cancer.
abstract: The catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic/) is the largest public resource for information on somatically acquired mutations in human cancer and is available freely without restrictions. Currently (v43, August 2009), COSMIC contains details of 1.5-million experiments performed through 13,423 genes in almost 370,000 tumours, describing over 90,000 individual mutations. Data are gathered from two sources, publications in the scientific literature, (v43 contains 7797 curated articles) and the full output of the genome-wide screens from the Cancer Genome Project (CGP) at the Sanger Institute, UK. Most of the world's literature on point mutations in human cancer has now been curated into COSMIC and while this is continually updated, a greater emphasis on curating fusion gene mutations is driving the expansion of this information; over 2700 fusion gene mutations are now described. Whole-genome sequencing screens are now identifying large numbers of genomic rearrangements in cancer and COSMIC is now displaying details of these analyses also. Examination of COSMIC's data is primarily web-driven, focused on providing mutation range and frequency statistics based upon a choice of gene and/or cancer phenotype. Graphical views provide easily interpretable summaries of large quantities of data, and export functions can provide precise details of user-selected data.
authors.affiliation: Cancer Genome Project, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK.
authors.forename: Simon A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Forbes
authors.forename: Gurpreet
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Nidhi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bindal
authors.forename: Sally
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bamford
authors.forename: Elisabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Dawson
authors.forename: Charlotte
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cole
authors.forename: Chai Yin
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Kok
authors.forename: Mingming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ewing
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Menzies
authors.forename: Jon W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Teague
authors.forename: Michael R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Stratton
authors.forename: P Andrew
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Futreal
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D003196:Computer Graphics; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D030562:Databases, Protein; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D020407:Internet; D009154:Mutation; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics*; D012984:Software