NRAS and melanoma: Melanoma patients frequently harbor somatic mutations in a number genes, including the BRAF gene that encodes the serine-threonine kinase [3]; the KIT gene that encodes the receptor tyrosine kinase [4]; the NRAS [5], GNA11 [6, 7] and GNAQ [7, 8] genes that encode the GTP-binding proteins; and the MAP2K1 [9] and MAP2K2 [10, 11] genes that encode the dual specificity mitogen-activated protein kinase kinases.