Correlation of p53 and DNA repair gene mutation patterns in human malignancies indicates different tumour suppression mechanisms of p53

Abstract

P53 suppresses tumorigenesis through multiple cellular functions/mechanisms. Recently, Janic A, et al. reported that DNA repair pathways are critical mediators of p53-dependent tumor suppression. We showed, by mining cBioPortal data of a range of human cancers, that the tendency of mutual exclusivity of mutations in p53 and DNA repair genes only exist in very limited human cancer types. In the majority of human cancers, p53 mutations are equally distributed between DNA repair gene mutation positive and negative cases and in a number of human cancers, p53 and DNA repair gene mutations have a tendency of co-occurrence. These different correlation patterns of p53 and DNA repair gene mutations in human malignancies may reflect different critical molecular/cellular pathways activated by p53 in different organs or cell types to suppress tumorigenesis.