对来自19个不同癌症类型的超过4000个肿瘤所做的一项分析评估了病毒在造成这种疾病中所起作用。发表在本期Nature Communications上的这项研究，为了解病毒在肿瘤形成中所起作用提供了一个综合性数据集。
Erik Larsson及同事利用来自“癌症基因组图谱”的数据检测来自19个不同癌症亚型的4438个肿瘤中是否存在病毒核酸，发现178个肿瘤含有病毒RNA。他们证实了宫颈癌中“人乳头状病毒”的存在，也证实了肝细胞癌中乙肝病毒的存在。然而，他们没有在乳腺癌或“多形性胶质母细胞瘤”（脑癌）中检测到病毒的存在，这两种癌症过去都曾被认为是由病毒引起的。这些数据覆盖一系列不同的肿瘤，包括膀胱、结肠、大脑、肾脏、皮肤、卵巢、前列腺、甲状腺、直肠和肺的肿瘤。他们发现，7.3%的膀胱癌、9.8%的结肠癌、14.8%的头部和颈部癌以及5.6%的直肠癌都含有病毒RNA，说明病毒在这些肿瘤的一小部分（的发病）当中可能扮演一定角色。
这些发现提供了有关肿瘤中病毒之存在的最大规模的分析结果，排除了病毒在肿瘤形成中起广泛作用的可能性。(生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐的英文摘要
Nature Communications doi:10.1038/ncomms3513
The landscape of viral expression and host gene fusion and adaptation in human cancer
Ka-Wei Tang,Babak Alaei-Mahabadi,Tore Samuelsson,Magnus Lindh& Erik Larsson
Viruses cause 10–15% of all human cancers. Massively parallel sequencing has recently proved effective for uncovering novel viruses and virus–tumour associations, but this approach has not yet been applied to comprehensive patient cohorts. Here we screen a diverse landscape of human cancer, encompassing 4,433 tumours and 19 cancer types, for known and novel expressed viruses based on >700 billion transcriptome sequencing reads from The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network. The resulting map confirms and extends current knowledge. We observe recurrent fusion events, including human papillomavirus insertions in RAD51B and ERBB2. Patterns of coadaptation between host and viral gene expression give clues to papillomavirus oncogene function. Importantly, our analysis argues strongly against viral aetiology in several cancers where this has frequently been proposed. We provide a virus–tumour map of unprecedented scale that constitutes a reference for future studies of tumour-associated viruses using transcriptome sequencing data.
