SUMMARY Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal malignancies due to its late diagnosis and limited response to treatment. Tractable methods to identify and interrogate pathways involved in pancreatic tumorigenesis are urgently needed. We established organoid models from normal and neoplastic murine and human pancreas tissues. Pancreatic organoids can be rapidly generated from resected tumors and biopsies, survive cryopreservation and exhibit ductal- and disease stage-specific characteristics. Orthotopically transplanted neoplastic organoids recapitulate the full spectrum of tumor development by forming early-grade neoplasms that progress to locally invasive and metastatic carcinomas. Due to their ability to be genetically manipulated, organoids are a platform to probe genetic cooperation. Comprehensive transcriptional and proteomic analyses of murine pancreatic organoids revealed genes and pathways altered during disease progression. The confirmation of many of these protein changes in human tissues demonstrates that organoids are a facile model system to discover characteristics of this deadly malignancy.

Breast cancer (BC) comprises multiple distinct subtypes that differ genetically, pathologically, and clinically. Here, we describe a robust protocol for long-term culturing of human mammary epithelial organoids. Using this protocol, >100 primary and metastatic BC organoid lines were generated, broadly recapitulating the diversity of the disease. BC organoid morphologies typically matched the histopathology, hormone receptor status, and HER2 status of the original tumor. DNA copy number variations as well as sequence changes were consistent within tumor-organoid pairs and largely retained even after extended passaging. BC organoids furthermore populated all major gene-expression-based classification groups and allowed in vitro drug screens that were consistent with in vivo xeno-transplantations and patient response. This study describes a representative collection of well-characterized BC organoids available for cancer research and drug development, as well as a strategy to assess in vitro drug response in a personalized fashion.

Summary: Sambamba is a high-performance robust tool and library for working with SAM, BAM and CRAM sequence alignment files; the most common file formats for aligned next generation sequencing data. Sambamba is a faster alternative to samtools that exploits multi-core processing and dramatically reduces processing time. Sambamba is being adopted at sequencing centers, not only because of its speed, but also because of additional functionality, including coverage analysis and powerful filtering capability.Availability and implementation: Sambamba is free and open source software, available under a GPLv2 license. Sambamba can be downloaded and installed from http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Sambamba.Sambamba v0.5.0 was released with doi:10.5281/zenodo.13200.Contact: j.c.p.prins@umcutrecht.nl