ANALYZING SOMATIC MUTAGENESIS IN SYSTEMIC SCLEROSIS

The study was undertaken with the aim of estimating differences in the mutational burden in lung tissues from healthy vs systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients. SSc is an auto-immune disease, with patients often developing cancer. However, the etiology of this phenomenon is poorly understood. As such we sought to uncover potential molecular mechanisms prevalent within SSc tissues that might be potentiating cancer. Samples were randomly collected from individuals from two broad ethnic groups, European (EA) and African American (AA). In total, samples were obtained from 7 individuals belonging to the EA group and 4 individuals from the AA group. For this study, ethnicity was not included as a confounding variable, given that the data set has roughly comparable number of individuals from both... (for more see dbGaP study page.)