Kidney cancers frequently undergo deletions affecting
chromosome 14q. To ascertain whether this abnormality occurs
more often in kidney cancers than in other forms of
cancer, we examined a recently published collection of copy
number data generated with high-density single-nucleotide
polymorphism (SNP) arrays from 3,131 cancers representing
26 different tumor types. The frequency of large deletions
affecting most of chromosome 14q was highest in kidney
cancer, followed by melanoma, gastrointestinal stromal
tumor, and esophageal cancer (Fig. 1A). As expected, loss of
chromosome 3p, which harbors the VHL tumor suppressor
gene and other tumor suppressor genes such as PBRM1,
as well as amplification of 5q, was also extremely common in
kidney cancer relative to other tumor types (Fig. 1B and C).
These data do not, however, reflect a general proclivity for
copy number alterations in kidney cancer because other copy
number changes, such as loss of chromosomes 17p and 13q, which harbor p53 and RB1, respectively, did not occur more
frequently in kidney cancer than in other cancers.