Somatic mutations - Evolution within the individual

With the rapid advancement of sequencing technologies over the last two decades, it is becoming feasible to detect rare variants from somatic tissue samples. Studying such somatic mutations can provide deep insights into various senescence-related diseases, including cancer, inflammation, and sporadic psychiatric disorders. While it is still a difficult task to identify true somatic mutations, relentless efforts to combine experimental and computational methods have made it possible to obtain reliable data. Furthermore, state-of-the-art machine learning approaches have drastically improved the efficiency and sensitivity of these methods. Meanwhile, we can regard somatic mutations as a counterpart of germline mutations, and it is possible to apply well-formulated mathematical frameworks developed for population genetics and molecular evolution to analyze this 'somatic evolution'. For example, retrospective cell lineage tracing is a promising technique to elucidate the mechanism of pre-diseases using single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data.