Human cancers are largely driven by aberrations – inherited and acquired – at the DNA, RNA, and protein levels. Faculty in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences work to discover these aberrations and dissect their impact using a variety of cutting-edge approaches. <br><br>DNA-level variation is the focus of the laboratories led by Charis Eng, Thomas LaFramboise, and Peter Scacheri. Charis Eng is the Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute, and leads a group focusing on inherited cancer syndromes. Among a wide range of projects, her group is examining the PTEN and SDH genes in Cowden syndrome, which has a high risk of breast, thyroid and endometrial cancers, and SDH-related heritable neuroendocrine neoplasias. Thomas LaFramboise's laboratory is primarily computational, and develops algorithmic approaches to mine large DNA sequence data sets for aberrations with roles in cancer and other diseases. His group has interests in both the germline (inherited) and sporadic DNA-level contributions to malignancy. Peter Scacheri and his team study the cancer epigenome, which is comprised of several classes of chemical modifications to DNA that can affect gene expression. His group has shown that signature epigenetic alterations underlie altered gene expression programs in cancer.