Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Cancer cells progressively evolve from a premalignant to a malignant state, which is driven by accumulating somatic alterations that confer normal cells a fitness advantage. Improvements in high-throughput sequencing techniques have led to an increase in construction of tumor phylogenetics and identification of somatic driver events that specifically occurred in different tumor progression stages. Here, we developed the SEECancer database ( http://biocc.hrbmu.edu.cn/SEECancer ), which aims to present the comprehensive cancer evolutionary stage-specific somatic events (including early-specific, late-specific, relapse-specific, metastasis-specific, drug-resistant and drug-induced genomic events) and their temporal orders. By manually curating over 10 000 published articles, 1231 evolutionary stage-specific genomic events and 5772 temporal orders involving 82 human cancers and 23 tissue origins were collected and deposited in the SEECancer database. Each entry contains the somatic event, evolutionary stage, cancer type, detection approach and relevant evidence. SEECancer provides a user-friendly interface for browsing, searching and downloading evolutionary stage-specific somatic events and temporal relationships in various cancers. With increasing attention on cancer genome evolution, the necessary information in SEECancer will facilitate understanding of cancer etiology and development of evolutionary therapeutics, and help clinicians to discover biomarkers for monitoring tumor progression.