Nat Commun: Scientists have developed a special "framework" that may help determine when cancer mutates

11, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Nature Communications, scientists from the University of California and others have developed a special framework to help determine which combination of tools is best suited to pinpoint the exact time of DNA mutations in the cancer genome.
researchers have developed a number of different algorithms to help determine the timing of mutations, but so far they don't know exactly which algorithm will work best and which common deviations will affect the results.
Photo Source: NIH Cancer is a genomic disease that continues to gain new mutations in its DNA as it progresses, and cancer cell populations continue to evolve, knowing the order in which they change or helping researchers study the evolution of cancer over time and see how cancer cell populations diversify or become unified.
the diversity or between cancer cell populations is directly related to the patient's response to the therapy, and it can also reveal susceptible targets that can be used to develop highly targeted therapies. In the
article, researchers evaluated 22 different "pipelines" used to determine the time of cancer genome mutations, and tested the algorithms in nearly 300 clinical prostate cancer samples to assess the effectiveness of each "workflow" and observe differences in its results, which may help researchers observe differences in different tools and make a fair assessment of each work.
Understand the timing and cause of tumor metastasis, or how it spreads to other parts of the body, or affect the way cancer patients are treated, the framework developed by the researchers in this paper may help them determine which tool is more accurate in responding to specific cases, while also producing more individual targeted therapy strategies for treating patients and minimizing the risk or likelihood of future cancer recurrence."
researcher Paul Boutros said more in-depth research will be carried out later to optimize the framework structure so that it can function more effectively and to help develop new methods or strategies for treating cancer.
() Original source: Liu, L.Y., Bhandari, V., Salcedo, A. et al. Quantifying the influence of mutation detection on tumour subclonal reconstruction. Nat Commun 11, 6247 (2020). doi:10.1038/s41467-020-20055-w。