Osteosarcomas are aggressive bone tumors with a high degree of genetic heterogeneity, which has historically complicated driver gene discovery.

Researchers sequence exomes of 31 tumors and decipher their evolutionary landscape by inferring clonality of the individual mutation events. Exome findings are interpreted in the context of mutation and SNP array data from a replication set of 92 tumors.

Authors identify 14 genes as the main drivers, of which some were formerly unknown in the context of osteosarcoma. None of the drivers is clearly responsible for the majority of tumors and even TP53 mutations are frequently mapped into subclones.

However, >80% of osteosarcomas exhibit a specific combination of single-base substitutions, LOH, or large-scale genome instability signatures characteristic of BRCA1/2-deficient tumors.

These findings imply that multiple oncogenic pathways drive chromosomal instability during osteosarcoma evolution and result in the acquisition of BRCA-like traits, which could be therapeutically exploited.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151203/ncomms9940/full/ncomms9940.html