ShatterProof: operational detection and quantification of chromothripsis.

BACKGROUND: Chromothripsis, a newly discovered type of complex genomic rearrangement, has been implicated in the evolution of several types of cancers. To date, it has been described in bone cancer, SHH-medulloblastoma and acute myeloid leukemia, amongst others, however there are still no formal or automated methods for detecting or annotating it in high throughput sequencing data. As such, findings of chromothripsis are difficult to compare and many cases likely escape detection altogether. RESULTS: We introduce ShatterProof, a software tool for detecting and quantifying chromothriptic events. ShatterProof takes structural variation calls (translocations, copy-number variations, short insertions and loss of heterozygosity) produced by any algorithm and using an operational definition of chromothripsis performs robust statistical tests to accurately predict the presence and location of chromothriptic events. Validation of our tool was conducted using clinical data sets including matched normal, prostate cancer samples in addition to the colorectal cancer and SCLC data sets used in the original description of chromothripsis. CONCLUSIONS: ShatterProof is computationally efficient, having low memory requirements and near linear computation time. This allows it to become a standard component of sequencing analysis pipelines, enabling researchers to routinely and accurately assess samples for chromothripsis. Source code and documentation can be found at http://search.cpan.org/~sgovind/Shatterproof.

Spatial genomic heterogeneity within localized, multifocal prostate cancer.

Herein we provide a detailed molecular analysis of the spatial heterogeneity of clinically localized, multifocal prostate cancer to delineate new oncogenes or tumor suppressors. We initially determined the copy number aberration (CNA) profiles of 74 patients with index tumors of Gleason score 7. Of these, 5 patients were subjected to whole-genome sequencing using DNA quantities achievable in diagnostic biopsies, with detailed spatial sampling of 23 distinct tumor regions to assess intraprostatic heterogeneity in focal genomics. Multifocal tumors are highly heterogeneous for single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), CNAs and genomic rearrangements. We identified and validated a new recurrent amplification of MYCL, which is associated with TP53 deletion and unique profiles of DNA damage and transcriptional dysregulation. Moreover, we demonstrate divergent tumor evolution in multifocal cancer and, in some cases, tumors of independent clonal origin. These data represent the first systematic relation of intraprostatic genomic heterogeneity to predicted clinical outcome and inform the development of novel biomarkers that reflect individual prognosis.

Improving the prediction of clinical outcomes from genomic data using multiresolution analysis.

The prediction of patient's future clinical outcome, such as Alzheimer's and cardiac disease, using only genomic information is an open problem. In cases when genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are able to find strong associations between genomic predictors (e.g., SNPs) and disease, pattern recognition methods may be able to predict the disease well. Furthermore, by using signal processing methods, we can capitalize on latent multivariate interactions of genomic predictors. Such an approach to genomic pattern recognition for prediction of clinical outcomes is investigated in this work. In particular, we show how multiresolution transforms can be applied to genomic data to extract cues of multivariate interactions and, in some cases, improve on the predictive performance of clinical outcomes of standard classification methods. Our results show, for example, that an improvement of about 6 percent increase of the area under the ROC curve can be achieved using multiresolution spaces to train logistic regression to predict late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) compared to logistic regression applied directly on SNP data.