All normal somatic cells are thought to acquire mutations. However, characterisation of the patterns and consequences of somatic mutation in normal tissues is limited. Uterine endometrium is a dynamic tissue that undergoes cyclical shedding and reconstitution and is lined by a gland-forming epithelium. Whole genome sequencing of normal endometrial glands showed that most are clonal cell populations derived from a recent common ancestor with mutation burdens differing from other normal cell types and manyfold lower than endometrial cancers. Mutational signatures found ubiquitously account for most mutations.Many, in some women potentially all, endometrial glands are colonised by cell clones carrying driver mutations in cancer genes, often with multiple drivers. Total and driver mutation burdens increase with age but are also influenced by other factors including body mass index and parity. Clones with drivers often originate during early decades of life. The somatic mutational landscapes of normal cells differ between cell types and are revealing the procession of neoplastic change leading to cancer.

The rates and patterns of somatic mutation in normal tissues are largely unknown outside of humans1–7. Comparative analyses can shed light on the diversity of mutagenesis across species, and on long-standing hypotheses about the evolution of somatic mutation rates and their role in cancer and ageing. Here we performed whole-genome sequencing of 208 intestinal crypts from 56 individuals to study the landscape of somatic mutation across 16 mammalian species. We found that somatic mutagenesis was dominated by seemingly endogenous mutational processes in all species, including 5-methylcytosine deamination and oxidative damage. With some differences, mutational signatures in other species resembled those described in humans8, although the relative contribution of each signature varied across species. Notably, the somatic mutation rate per year varied greatly across species and exhibited a strong inverse relationship with species lifespan, with no other life-history trait studied showing a comparable association. Despite widely different life histories among the species we examined—including variation of around 30-fold in lifespan and around 40,000-fold in body mass—the somatic mutation burden at the end of lifespan varied only by a factor of around 3. These data unveil common mutational processes across mammals, and suggest that somatic mutation rates are evolutionarily constrained and may be a contributing factor in ageing.

Melanoma is difficult to treat once it becomes metastatic. However, the precise ancestral relationship between primary tumors and their metastases is not well understood. We performed whole-exome sequencing of primary melanomas and multiple matched metastases from eight patients to elucidate their phylogenetic relationships. In six of eight patients, we found that genetically distinct cell populations in the primary tumor metastasized in parallel to different anatomic sites, rather than sequentially from one site to the next. In five of these six patients, the metastasizing cells had themselves arisen from a common parental subpopulation in the primary, indicating that the ability to establish metastases is a late-evolving trait. Interestingly, we discovered that individual metastases were sometimes founded by multiple cell populations of the primary that were genetically distinct. Such establishment of metastases by multiple tumor subpopulations could help explain why identical resistance variants are identified in different sites after initial response to systemic therapy. One primary tumor harbored two subclones with different oncogenic mutations in CTNNB1, which were both propagated to the same metastasis, raising the possibility that activation of wingless-type mouse mammary tumor virus integration site (WNT) signaling may be involved, as has been suggested by experimental models.A s in many other solid tumors, melanoma metastases often first present in lymph nodes in the draining area of the primary, whereas distant metastases tend to appear later (1). The conclusion that melanoma follows a linear progression from primary tumor to regional to distant metastases has supported preemptive surgical removal of regional lymph nodes with curative intent (2). However, several observations suggest that distant metastases are seeded early, contemporaneously with regional metastases. Patients who undergo resection of lymph node basins harboring metastasis do not experience a significantly extended life expectancy (3, 4). Furthermore, circulating melanoma cells were detected in the blood of 26% of patients who only have metastases detected regionally (5, 6).Melanoma, like other cancers, arises and evolves through the accumulation of genetic alterations within tumor cells (7-9). Comparing somatic mutations in primary tumor and regional and distant metastases from the same patient can provide insight into the phylogenetic relationships between these distinct tumor cell populations and the order of metastatic dissemination (8, 10). These analyses may also establish whether cells in the primary tumor that metastasize acquired this ability to disseminate and seed other anatomic sites by a newly acquired genetic alteration, or whether metastatic colonization is simply a stochastic process of which all cells in the primary are capable but few succeed.Using whole-exome sequencing (for discovery) and targeted sequencing (for validation), we analyzed mutation patterns of primary melanomas and two or more metastases in each of e...

BackgroundThe assessment of cell-free circulating DNA fragments, also known as a "liquid biopsy" of the patient's plasma, is an important source for the discovery and subsequent non-invasive monitoring of cancer and other pathological conditions. Although the nucleosome-guided fragmentation patterns of cell-free DNA (cfDNA) have not yet been studied in detail, non-random representation of cfDNA sequencies may reflect chromatin features in the tissue of origin at gene-regulation level.ResultsIn this study, we investigated the association between epigenetic landscapes of human tissues evident in the patterns of cfDNA in plasma by deep sequencing of human cfDNA samples. We have demonstrated that baseline characteristics of cfDNA fragmentation pattern are in concordance with the ones corresponding to cell lines-derived. To identify the loci differentially represented in cfDNA fragment, we mapped the transcription start sites within the sequenced cfDNA fragments and tested for association of these genomic coordinates with the relative strength and the patterns of gene expressions. Preselected sets of house-keeping and tissue specific genes were used as models for actively expressed and silenced genes. Developed measure of gene regulation was able to differentiate these two sets based on sequencing coverage near gene transcription start site.ConclusionExperimental outcomes suggest that cfDNA retains characteristics previously noted in genome-wide analysis of chromatin structure, in particular, in MNase-seq assays. Thus far the analysis of the DNA fragmentation pattern may aid further developing of cfDNA based biomarkers for a variety of human conditions.

Changes in gene copy number are important in the setting of precision medicine. Recent studies have established that copy number alterations (CNAs) can be detected in sequencing libraries prepared by hybridization-capture, but there has been comparatively little attention given to CNA assessment in amplicon-based libraries prepared by PCR. In this study, we developed an algorithm for detecting CNAs in amplicon-based sequencing data. CNAs determined from the algorithm mirrored those from a hybridization-capture library. In addition, analysis of 14 pairs of matched normal and breast carcinoma tissues revealed that sequence data pooled from normal samples could be substituted for a matched normal tissue without affecting the detection of clinically relevant CNAs (>j2j copies). Comparison of CNAs identified by array comparative genomic hybridization and amplicon-based libraries across 10 breast carcinoma samples showed an excellent correlation. The CNA algorithm also compared favorably with fluorescence in situ hybridization, with agreement in 33 of 38 assessments across four different genes. Factors that influenced the detection of CNAs included the number of amplicons per gene, the average read depth, and, most important, the proportion of tumor within the sample. Our results show that CNAs can be identified in amplicon-based targeted sequencing data, and that their detection can be optimized by ensuring adequate tumor content and read coverage. (J Mol Diagn 2015, 17: 53e63; http://dx