M (2014) Interaction-based discovery of functionally important genes in cancers

A major challenge in cancer genomics is uncovering genes with an active role in tumorigenesis from a potentially large pool of mutated genes across patient samples. Here we focus on the interactions that proteins make with nucleic acids, small mol-ecules, ions and peptides, and show that residues within proteins that are involved in these inter-actions are more frequently affected by mutations observed in large-scale cancer genomic data than are other residues. We leverage this observation to predict genes that play a functionally important role in cancers by introducing a computational pipelin