The effects of abnormalities in the DNA glycosylases NEIL1, NEIL2, and NEIL3 on human cancer have not been fully elucidated. In this paper, we found that the median somatic total mutation loads and the median somatic single nucleotide mutation loads exhibited significant inverse correlations with the median NEIL1 and NEIL2 expression levels and a significant positive correlation with the median NEIL3 expression level using data for 13 cancer types from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. A subset of the cancer types exhibited reduced NEIL1 and NEIL2 expressions and elevated NEIL3 expression, and such abnormal expressions of NEIL1, NEIL2, and NEIL3 were also significantly associated with the mutation loads in cancer. As a mechanism underlying the reduced expression of NEIL1 in cancer, the epigenetic silencing of NEIL1 through promoter hypermethylation was found. Finally, we investigated the reason why an elevated NEIL3 expression level was associated with an increased number of somatic mutations in cancer and found that NEIL3 expression was positively correlated with the expression of APOBEC3B, a potent inducer of mutations, in diverse cancers. These results suggested that the abnormal expressions of NEIL1, NEIL2, and NEIL3 are involved in cancer through their association with the somatic mutation load.
DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank International Nucleotide Sequence Database is still increasing, keeping doubling time only slightly longer than one year for the last these years. This situation affects the increase of DDBJ Amino acid sequence Database (DAD) [4], which is made from translation of nucleotide sequences in CDS regions annotated in DDBJ [3], and makes computation time for homology search of DAD longer as well as that of DNA database. We therefore created compressed sequence database, consisting of highly homologous sequence clusters in multiple aligned form with representative sequences, the DAD version of CAMUS (Compressed database for homology searches And MUltiple aligned Sequence database) [2].
