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Editor’s note: All cancer cells carry somatic mutations. Some of these mutations, termed driver mutations, confer selective clonal growth advantage and are implicated in cancer development; the remainder are passenger mutations. To gain insight into the driving forces behind cancer, researchers have evaluated numerous methods for identifying somatic mutations in cancers. Recent technological advances have made systematic sequencing of the entire cancer genome possible through detection of randomly generated DNA fragments. The current researchers, a leading group in cancer genetics based at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Hinxton, UK), recently completed the genomic sequence of a single melanoma cell line, COLO-829, which is derived from a metastasis of a malignant melanoma in a 43-year-old male patient.