Cancer from smoking tobacco is considered dependent on mutagens, but significant molecular aspects of smoking-specific, cancer development remain unknown. We defined sets of coding regions for oncoproteins, tumor suppressor proteins, and cytoskeletal-related proteins that were compared between nonsmokers and smokers, for mutation occurrences, in the lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), head and neck squamous carcinoma (HNSC), bladder carcinoma (BLCA), and pancreatic adenocarcinoma ( PAAD) datasets from the cancer genome atlas (TCGA). We uncovered significant differences in overall mutation rates, and in mutation rates in cytoskeletal protein-related coding regions (CPCRs, including extracellular matrix protein coding regions), between nonsmokers and smokers in LUAD and HNSC (P < 0.001), raising the question of whether the CPCR mutation differences lead to different clinical courses for nonsmoker and smoker cancers. Another important question inspired by these results is, whether high smoker cancer mutation rates would facilitate genotoxicity or neoantigen-based therapies. No significant, mutation-based differences were found in the BLCA or PAAD datasets, between nonsmokers and smokers. However, a significant difference was uncovered for the average number of overall cancer mutations, in LUAD, for persons who stopped smoking more than 15 years ago, compared with more recent smokers (P < 0.032).
Keywords: TCGA; Cytoskeleton; DNA methylation; extracellular matrix; mutation; oncogenes; smoking cessation; tobacco use; tumor suppressor genes.
© 2016 The Authors. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society.