Mutation bursts associated with cancer -- a very good summary
/Researchers have created a huge resource for investigating the biological mechanisms that cause cancer. The scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators identified which patterns of DNA damage—mutational fingerprints that represent the origins of cancer—were present in over a thousand human cancer cell lines. They also revealed that a major mutation pattern found in human cancer, previously linked to a virus-fighting immune response, occurred in bursts in cancer cell lines with long periods of silence in between, but the cause of these mutational bursts remains mysterious.