A Multi-labeled Tree Edit Distance for Comparing "Clonal Trees" of Tumor Progression

We introduce a new edit distance measure between a pair of "clonal trees", each representing the progression and mutational heterogeneity of a tumor sample, constructed by the use of single cell or bulk high throughput sequencing data. In a clonal tree, each vertex represents a specific tumor clone, and is labeled with one or more mutations in a way that each mutation is assigned to the oldest clone that harbors it. Given two clonal trees, our multi-labeled tree edit distance (MLTED) measure is defined as the minimum number of mutation/label deletions, (empty) leaf deletions, and vertex (clonal) expansions, applied in any order, to convert each of the two trees to the maximal common tree. We show that the MLTED measure can be computed efficiently in polynomial time and it captures the similarity between trees of different clonal granularity well. We have implemented our algorithm to compute MLTED exactly and applied it to a variety of data sets successfully. The source code of our method can be found in: https://github.com/khaled-rahman/leafDelTED

A Multi-Labeled Tree Dissimilarity Measure for Comparing “Clonal Trees” of Tumor Progression

We introduce a new dissimilarity measure between a pair of “clonal trees”, each representing the progression and mutational heterogeneity of a tumor sample, constructed by the use of single cell or bulk high throughput sequencing data. In a clonal tree, each vertex represents a specific tumor clone, and is labeled with one or more mutations in a way that each mutation is assigned to the oldest clone that harbors it. Given two clonal trees, our multi-labeled tree dissimilarity (MLTD) measure is defined as the minimum number of mutation/label deletions, (empty) leaf deletions, and vertex (clonal) expansions, applied in any order, to convert each of the two trees to the maximum common tree. We show that the MLTD measure can be computed efficiently in polynomial time and it captures the similarity between trees of different clonal granularity well

Integrative Inference of Subclonal Tumour Evolution from Single-Cell and Bulk Sequencing Data

Understanding the clonal architecture and evolutionary history of a tumour poses one of the key challenges to overcome treatment failure due to resistant cell populations. Previously, studies on subclonal tumour evolution have been primarily based on bulk sequencing and in some recent cases on single-cell sequencing data. Either data type alone has shortcomings with regard to this task, but methods integrating both data types have been lacking. Here, we present B-SCITE, the first computational approach that infers tumour phylogenies from combined single-cell and bulk sequencing data. Using a comprehensive set of simulated data, we show that B-SCITE systematically outperforms existing methods with respect to tree reconstruction accuracy and subclone identification. B-SCITE provides high-fidelity reconstructions even with a modest number of single cells and in cases where bulk allele frequencies are affected by copy number changes. On real tumour data, B-SCITE generated mutation histories show high concordance with expert generated trees

Characterizing genetic intra-tumor heterogeneity across 2,658 human cancer genomes.

Intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH) is a mechanism of therapeutic resistance and therefore an important clinical challenge. However, the extent, origin, and drivers of ITH across cancer types are poorly understood. To address this, we extensively characterize ITH across whole-genome sequences of 2,658 cancer samples spanning 38 cancer types. Nearly all informative samples (95.1%) contain evidence of distinct subclonal expansions with frequent branching relationships between subclones. We observe positive selection of subclonal driver mutations across most cancer types and identify cancer type-specific subclonal patterns of driver gene mutations, fusions, structural variants, and copy number alterations as well as dynamic changes in mutational processes between subclonal expansions. Our results underline the importance of ITH and its drivers in tumor evolution and provide a pan-cancer resource of comprehensively annotated subclonal events from whole-genome sequencing data

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

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Collaborative intra-tumor heterogeneity detection

Motivation Despite the remarkable advances in sequencing and computational techniques, noise in the data and complexity of the underlying biological mechanisms render deconvolution of the phylogenetic relationships between cancer mutations difficult. Besides that, the majority of the existing datasets consist of bulk sequencing data of single tumor sample of an individual. Accurate inference of the phylogenetic order of mutations is particularly challenging in these cases and the existing methods are faced with several theoretical limitations. To overcome these limitations, new methods are required for integrating and harnessing the full potential of the existing data. Results We introduce a method called Hintra for intra-tumor heterogeneity detection. Hintra integrates sequencing data for a cohort of tumors and infers tumor phylogeny for each individual based on the evolutionary information shared between different tumors. Through an iterative process, Hintra learns the repeating evolutionary patterns and uses this information for resolving the phylogenetic ambiguities of individual tumors. The results of synthetic experiments show an improved performance compared to two state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results with a recent Breast Cancer dataset are consistent with the existing knowledge and provide potentially interesting findings. Availability and implementation The source code for Hintra is available at https://github.com/sahandk/HINTRA

Integrative inference of subclonal tumour evolution from single-cell and bulk sequencing data

Understanding the clonal architecture and evolutionary history of a tumour poses one of the key challenges to overcome treatment failure due to resistant cell populations. Previously, studies on subclonal tumour evolution have been primarily based on bulk sequencing and in some recent cases on single-cell sequencing data. Either data type alone has shortcomings with regard to this task, but methods integrating both data types have been lacking. Here, we present B-SCITE, the first computational approach that infers tumour phylogenies from combined single-cell and bulk sequencing data. Using a comprehensive set of simulated data, we show that B-SCITE systematically outperforms existing methods with respect to tree reconstruction accuracy and subclone identification. B-SCITE provides high-fidelity reconstructions even with a modest number of single cells and in cases where bulk allele frequencies are affected by copy number changes. On real tumour data, B-SCITE generated mutation histories show high concordance with expert generated trees.ISSN:2041-172