Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 21, 2026

Author Spotlight: Advancing the Detection of Low-Frequency Mutations in Cancer Tissues
Published on: August 23, 2024
Quantifying immune-based counterselection of somatic mutations
Fan Yang1,2,3, Dae-Kyum Kim1,2,3, Hidewaki Nakagawa4
1Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract:
Somatic mutations in protein-coding regions can generate 'neoantigens' causing developing cancers to be eliminated by the immune system. Quantitative estimates of the strength of this counterselection phenomenon have been lacking. We quantified the extent to which somatic mutations are depleted in peptides that are predicted to be displayed by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I proteins. The extent of this depletion depended on expression level of the neoantigenic gene, and on whether the patient had one or two MHC-encoding alleles that can display the peptide, suggesting MHC-encoding alleles are incompletely dominant. This study provides an initial quantitative understanding of counter-selection of identifiable subclasses of neoantigenic somatic variation.
Related Concept Videos
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell
Mutations
Mutations
Chromosomal Alterations Are Large-Scale Mutations
While point mutations are changes in a single nucleotide in...
Viral Mutations
Mutation, Gene Flow, and Genetic Drift
What is the Immune System?

