Figure 3

Identification of novel driver genes in ovarian carcinoma. (A) Pipeline to identify putative driver genes on the basis of patient and gene properties. Starting from all tumour samples with mutation and expression data, the first filters removes samples with mutations in known cancer genes and with mutated genes that are not expressed. Then, only short genes with damaging mutations are retained. Finally, genes with properties that resemble those of known cancer genes are identified as putative drivers. (B) Volcano plot for the expression of mutated genes in ovarian carcinomas. Of the 7,048 total mutated genes, only 4,723 had expression data. Of those, 223 were known cancer genes of the Cancer Gene Census [58]; 36 were previously defined as candidate cancer genes in ovarian cancer [11, 62]; all remaining 4,464 mutated genes had no putative involvement in cancer. (C) Identification of novel drivers in ovarian carcinomas. Following our pipeline, we identified 56 genes that may favour cancer development in 23 ovarian cancer patients.