A pan-cancer genome-wide analysis reveals tumour dependencies by induction of nonsense-mediated decay

Nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) eliminates transcripts with premature termination codons. Although NMD-induced loss-of-function has been shown to contribute to the genesis of particular cancers, its global functional consequence in tumours has not been characterized. Here we develop an algorithm to predict NMD and apply it on somatic mutations reported in The Cancer Genome Atlas. We identify more than 73 K mutations that are predicted to elicit...