The mechanism of telomerase re-activation in cancer had remained elusive until the
discovery of frequent mutations in the promoter of the TERT gene that encodes the catalytic
reverse transcriptase subunit of telomerase. We investigated the regulation of TERT
expression in melanoma cell lines and our results show that promoter mutations render
TERT expression dependent on MAPK activation due to oncogenic BRAF or NRAS
mutations. Mutations in the TERT promoter create binding sites for ETS transcription factors …