Numerous large-scale efforts have been undertaken to catalog and understand the biology of cancer-associated mutations in regions that directly code for proteins. Much of the genome, however, consists of noncoding regions that do not directly encode specific proteins, but instead perform other functions such as regulating protein expression. These genome regions can also play key roles in cancer. Dietlein et al. developed a computational approach to systematically detect cancer-associated mutations in noncoding regions of different cancer types and directly examined the biological function of one such region involved in breast cancer. Using this genome-wide approach, researchers should be able to comprehensively examine the contributions of noncoding regions to cancer development.
