Quantifying Clonal and Subclonal Passenger Mutations in Cancer Evolution.

ABSTRACT: The vast majority of mutations in the exome of cancer cells are passengers, which do not affect the reproductive rate of the cell. Passengers can provide important information about the evolutionary history of an individual cancer, and serve as a molecular clock. Passengers can also become targets for immunotherapy or confer resistance to treatment. We study the stochastic expansion of a population of cancer cells describing the growth of primary tumors or metastatic lesions. We first analyze the process by looking forward in time and calculate the fixation probabilities and frequencies of successive passenger mutations ordered by their time of appearance. We compute the likelihood of specific evolutionary trees, thereby informing the phylogenetic reconstruction of cancer evolution in indi

SUBMITTER: Bozic I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4734774 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature