COSMIC 2005

The Catalogue Of Somatic Mutations In Cancer ( COSMIC) database and web site was developed to preserve somatic mutation data and share it with the community. Over the past 25 years, approximately 350 cancer genes have been identified, of which 311 are somatically mutated. COSMIC has been expanded and now holds data previously reported in the scientific literature for 28 known cancer genes. In addition, there is data from the systematic sequencing of 518 protein kinase genes. The total gene count in COSMIC stands at 538; 25 have a mutation frequency above 5% in one or more tumour type, no mutations were found in 333 genes and 180 are rarely mutated with frequencies < 5% in any tumour set. The COSMIC web site has been expanded to give more views and summaries of the data and provide faster query routes and downloads. In addition, there is a new section describing mutations found through a screen of known cancer genes in 728 cancer cell lines including the NCI-60 set of cancer cell lines.