It has long been assumed that DNA sequences and corresponding RNA transcripts are almost identical; a recent discovery, however, revealed widespread RNA-DNA differences (RDDs), which represent a largely unexplored aspect of human genome variation. It has been speculated that RDDs can affect disease susceptibility and manifestations; however, almost nothing is known about how RDDs are related to disease. Here, we show that RDDs are rarer in proto-oncogenes than in tumor suppressor genes; the number of RDDs in coding exons, but not in 3′UTR and 5′UTR, is significantly lower in the former than the latter, and this trend is especially pronounced in non-synonymous RDDs, i.e., those cause amino acid changes. A potential mechanism is that, unlike proto-oncogenes, the requirement of tumor suppressor genes to have both alleles affected to cause tumor ‘buffers’ these genes to tolerate more RDDs.

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