Synonymous mutations have been viewed as silent mutations, since they only affect the DNA and mRNA, but not the amino acid sequence of the resulting protein. Nonetheless, recent studies suggest their significant impact on splicing, RNA stability, RNA folding, translation or co-translational protein folding. Hence, we compile 659194 synonymous mutations found in human cancer and characterize their properties. We provide the user-friendly, comprehensive resource for synonymous mutations in cancer, SynMICdb (
http://SynMICdb.dkfz.de
), which also contains orthogonal information about gene annotation, recurrence, mutation loads, cancer association, conservation, alternative events, impact on mRNA structure and a SynMICdb score. Notably, synonymous and missense mutations are depleted at the 5'-end of the coding sequence as well as at the ends of internal exons independen...

A pan-cancer analysis of synonymous mutations

10.1038/s41467-019-10489-2