How do benign moles become melanomas?
Benign moles or nevi are proliferations of melanocytes, the pigment producing cells in the skin. The melanocytes proliferate in an uncontrolled manner for a short period of time, resulting the in mole but then stop and normally remain benign for the person’s lifetime. However, very infrequently (>1/300,000) they will continue to develop to melanoma. One of the changes that characterises the change is increased genomic instability, loss or gain of chromosomes or parts of chromosome. We have identified a potential mechanism by which this might occur, and interestingly, components of this mechanism are common targets for genomic loss in early melanomas. Projects are available to investigate how this occurs, and what initially triggers the genomic instability. This project intersects cancer cell biology and genomics.