13 research outputs found
Critical phenomena and universal dynamics in one-dimensional driven diffusive systems with two species of particles
Recent work on stochastic interacting particle systems with two particle
species (or single-species systems with kinematic constraints) has demonstrated
the existence of spontaneous symmetry breaking, long-range order and phase
coexistence in nonequilibrium steady states, even if translational invariance
is not broken by defects or open boundaries. If both particle species are
conserved, the temporal behaviour is largely unexplored, but first results of
current work on the transition from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale
yield exact coupled nonlinear hydrodynamic equations and indicate the emergence
of novel types of shock waves which are collective excitations stabilized by
the flow of microscopic fluctuations. We review the basic stationary and
dynamic properties of these systems, highlighting the role of conservation laws
and kinetic constraints for the hydrodynamic behaviour, the microscopic origin
of domain wall (shock) stability and the coarsening dynamics of domains during
phase separation.Comment: 72 pages, 6 figures, 201 references (topical review for J. Phys. A:
Math. Gen.
Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes
Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe