Background

Mucosal melanoma is a tumor caused by the malignant transformation of pigment-producing cells and can arise from any mucosal tissue where melanocytes are present. Due to its rarity, the mucosal melanoma subtype is poorly described, and its genetic characteristics are infrequently studied. The discovery or confirmation of new mucosal melanoma susceptibility genes will provide important insights for the study of its pathogenesis.

Materials and methods

We performed deep targeted sequencing of 100 previously reported melanoma-related genes in 39 mucosal melanoma samples and a gene-level loss-of-function (LOF) variant enrichment analysis for mucosal melanoma from different incidence sites.

Results

We detected 7,589 variants in these samples, and 484 were LOF variants (gain or loss of a stop codon, missense, and splice site). Four different gene-level enrichment analyses revealed that FSIP1 (fibrous sheath interacting protein 1) is a susceptibility gene for oral mucosal melanoma (OR = 0.33, P_Chi = 4.05 × 10⁻², P_burden = 3.06 × 10⁻², P_skat = 3.01 × 10⁻², P_skato = 3.01 × 10⁻²), whereas the different methods did not detect a significant susceptibility gene for the other subtypes.

Conclusions

In our study, a susceptibility gene for oral mucosal melanoma was confirmed in a Chinese Han population, and these findings contribute to a better genetic understanding of mucosal melanoma of different subtypes.