In a study published August 10 in Nature, scientists have charted the genetic landscape across a human prostate in high resolution and discovered how additional or missing chunks of chromosomes, known as copy number variations, thought to be unique to cancer are often present in seemingly healthy tissue.
“This was surprisingly and completely unexpected,” says study coauthor Alastair Lamb, a urologist at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences. “We thought that these kinds of changes defined prostate cancer. But they are present in [tissue] which is entirely benign.”
Far from a uniform mass of cells, tumors consist of a patchwork of malignant, benign, and healthy tissues. Understanding how normal cells become cancerous requires that scientists plot the genetic changes within this complex ecosystem. In collaboration with gene technology researcher Joakim Lundeberg and colleagues at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Lamb’s team used a technique called spatial ...
