Current Issue
Volume 540 Number 7631 pp7-162
1 December 2016
This Week
News In Focus
About the cover
Malignant germ cells with loss of heterozygosity undergoing apoptosis. Tumours formed from germ cells — those cells that develop in the embryo to become the cells of the reproductive system — tend to be more sensitive to chemotherapy than are many other adult cancers. To establish the basis for this chemosensitivity and the drivers of clinical resistance, Eliezer Van Allen, Christopher Sweeney and colleagues performed clinical whole-exome and transcriptome sequencing of germ-cell tumours from patients with various clinical outcomes, including the very rare case of death from germ-cell tumours. They find that primary germ-cell tumours are highly enriched for chromosomal reciprocal loss of heterozygosity, and for mutations in KRAS, and have high mitochondrial priming. This work provides insights into chemosensitivity and the evolution of chemoresistance in germ-cell tumours. Cover: Ella Marushchenko & Elina Korobenko (Ella Maru Studio, Inc.)
