Finally, since we performed a massively parallel sequencing of multiple cancer-related genes, we assessed the prognostic value of the top mutated genes (i.e. those found mutated in at least 5% of samples: ATM, KRAS, BRAF, NRAS, APC, PIK3CA, SMAD4, FBXW7 and MET) and applied the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure in order to decrease the false discovery rate, demonstrating that the P-value for ATM mutational status remained significant (P = 0.04) (Supplementary Table S2 in Supplementary Information). The gene discussed is SMAD4; the disease is cancer.