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Detecting Somatic Genetic Alterations in Tumor Specimens by Exon Capture and Massively Parallel Sequencing
Published on: October 18, 2013
Neutral Theory and the Somatic Evolution of Cancer
Vincent L Cannataro1, Jeffrey P Townsend1,2,3
1Department of Biostatistics, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Abstract:
Kimura's neutral theory argued that positive selection was not responsible for an appreciable fraction of molecular substitutions. Correspondingly, quantitative analysis reveals that the vast majority of substitutions in cancer genomes are not detectably under selection. Insights from the somatic evolution of cancer reveal that beneficial substitutions in cancer constitute a small but important fraction of the molecular variants. The molecular evolution of cancer community will benefit by incorporating the neutral theory of molecular evolution into their understanding and analysis of cancer evolution-and accepting the use of tractable, predictive models, even when there is some evidence that they are not perfect.
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