Comments by Kenneth Kinzler, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore.
This paper, says Kenneth Kinzler, an associate professor in the department of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, gives evidence for "the association of [a protein called] APC with the catenins--intracellular proteins which are known to be involved in cell adhesion." It was published alongside a second report of the same results by an independent research group (B. Rubinfeld et al., Science, 262:1731-4, 1993), which has also been cited in about 100 publications.
Kinzler speculates that the reason other researchers view this finding as so exciting is that it "provides the first major clues as to the function of APC and suggests an interesting link between cell adhesion and cancer-related mutations."
APC has been of interest to oncologists because of its link to colon cancer; in fact, Kinzler notes, the gene was named for adenomatous polyposis-coli. "Alterations ...
