Issues

There has been limited progress in obtaining a comprehensive genomic analysis of colorectal adenomas and at-risk mucosa. Therefore, exome sequencing efforts focusing on the characterization of the evolution from normal tissue to carcinoma via greater resolution of molecular changes at the inflection point of premalignant lesions are critical to identify novel candidate genes involved in intestinal carcinogenesis that could serve as biomarkers and drug targets for future chemoprevention trials. The cover is displaying a circos plot summarizing the genomic landscape of 25 colorectal adenomas from patients diagnosed with familial adenomatous polyposis. The outer ideogram runs clockwise from chromosome 1 to 22. The tracks from outside going in present stop gains and frameshift mutations (green), nonsynonymous and indels that produce non-frameshift mutations (red), synonymous mutations (purple), allelic frequencies of detected somatic mutations (light purple), and percentage of adenomas in the cohort that harbor somatic alterations (blue). The genes displayed outside the chromosomes harbor somatic mutations classified as damaging. Genes in red have been found recurrently mutated. Finally, inner ideograms display copy number profiles in different shades of green: amplification (light), copy-neutral LOH (dark), and deletions (medium) are depicted from the outside to inside. See the article by Borras and colleagues (beginning on page 417) for more information.