JointSNVMix: a probabilistic model for accurate detection of somatic mutations in normal/tumour paired next-generation sequencing data

摘要

Motivation: Identification of somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in tumour genomes is a necessary step in defining the mutational landscapes of cancers. Experimental designs for genome-wide ascertainment of somatic mutations now routinely include next-generation sequencing (NGS) of tumour DNA and matched constitutional DNA from the same individual. This allows investigators to control for germline polymorphisms and distinguish somatic mutations that are unique to the tumour, thus reducing the burden of labour-intensive and expensive downstream experiments needed to verify initial predictions. In order to make full use of such paired datasets, computational tools for simultaneous analysis of tumour–normal paired sequence data are required, but are currently under-developed and under-represented in the bioinformatics literature.