Cross-Species Oncogenomics in Cancer Gene Identification

The complexity of genomic aberrations in most human tumors hampers delineation of the genes that drive the tumorigenic process. In this issue of Cell, Kim et al. (2006) and Zender et al. (2006) demonstrate that cognate mouse tumor models recapitulate these genetic alterations with unexpected fidelity. These results indicate that cross-species genomic analysis is a powerful strategy to identify the responsible genes and assess their oncogenic capacity in the appropriate genetic context.