Evolutionary acquired robustness and vulnerability in cancer genome: negligible negative selection in carcinogenesis

Cancer is a disease involving the accumulation of somatic genetic alterations accompanied by clonal evolution (1,2). A wide range of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes are known to be mutated, deleted, rearranged, and/or amplified in most cancers. These genes have been identified by functional analyses (transformation of NIH3T3), genetic linkage analyses, and structural genomic analyses such as cytogenetics.