Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 27, 2025

Detecting Somatic Genetic Alterations in Tumor Specimens by Exon Capture and Massively Parallel Sequencing
Published on: October 18, 2013
Modeling tissue-specific breakpoint proximity of structural variations from whole-genomes to identify cancer drivers
Alexander Martinez-Fundichely1,2,3,4, Austin Dixon5,6, Ekta Khurana7,8,9,10
1Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, 10021, USA. alm2069@med.cornell.edu.
Abstract:
Structural variations (SVs) in cancer cells often impact large genomic regions with functional consequences. However, identification of SVs under positive selection is a challenging task because little is known about the genomic features related to the background breakpoint distribution in different cancers. We report a method that uses a generalized additive model to investigate the breakpoint proximity curves from 2,382 whole-genomes of 32 cancer types. We find that a multivariate model, which includes linear and nonlinear partial contributions of various tissue-specific features and their interaction terms, can explain up to 57% of the observed deviance of breakpoint proximity. In particular, three-dimensional genomic features such as topologically associating domains (TADs), TAD-boundaries and their interaction with other features show significant contributions. The model is validated by identification of known cancer genes and revealed putative drivers in cancers different than those with previous evidence of positive selection.
More Related Videos
10:27Testing Targeted Therapies in Cancer using Structural DNA Alteration Analysis and Patient-Derived Xenografts
Published on: July 25, 2020
08:15gDNA Enrichment by a Transposase-based Technology for NGS Analysis of the Whole Sequence of BRCA1, BRCA2, and 9 Genes Involved in DNA Damage Repair
Published on: October 6, 2014
Related Concept Videos
Cancers Originate from Somatic Mutations in a Single Cell
Cancer-Critical Genes II: Tumor Suppressor Genes
When the function of certain critical genes, especially those involved in cell cycle regulation and cell growth signaling cascades, gets disrupted, it upsets the cell cycle progression. Such cells with unchecked cell cycles start proliferating uncontrollably and eventually develop into tumors.
Such genes that act...
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...
Genome-wide Association Studies-GWAS
GWAS does not require the identification of the target gene involved in...