Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Williams, Marc J
• Werner, Benjamin
• Barnes, Chris P
• Graham, Trevor A
• Sottoriva, Andrea

Titel

Identification of neutral tumor evolution across cancer types

Ist Teil von

• Nature genetics, 2016-03, Vol.48 (3), p.238-244

Ort / Verlag

New York: Nature Publishing Group US

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Andrea Sottoriva, Trevor Graham and colleagues analyze tumor sequencing data and show that a substantial proportion of cancers of many different types are characterized by neutral evolution resulting in a characteristic power-law distribution of the mutant allele frequencies. This neutral framework provides a new way to interpret cancer genomic data and to discriminate between functional and non-functional intratumoral heterogeneity. Despite extraordinary efforts to profile cancer genomes, interpreting the vast amount of genomic data in the light of cancer evolution remains challenging. Here we demonstrate that neutral tumor evolution results in a power-law distribution of the mutant allele frequencies reported by next-generation sequencing of tumor bulk samples. We find that the neutral power law fits with high precision 323 of 904 cancers from 14 types and from different cohorts. In malignancies identified as evolving neutrally, all clonal selection seemingly occurred before the onset of cancer growth and not in later-arising subclones, resulting in numerous passenger mutations that are responsible for intratumoral heterogeneity. Reanalyzing cancer sequencing data within the neutral framework allowed the measurement, in each patient, of both the in vivo mutation rate and the order and timing of mutations. This result provides a new way to interpret existing cancer genomic data and to discriminate between functional and non-functional intratumoral heterogeneity.