Speaker 

Wen-Ping Hsieh (NTHU)

Abstract

Tumors are known to be heterogeneous in their genetic composition. Not all of the cells in the same tissue sample are carrying the same set of DNA variation. This intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) has been studied a lot in different cancer types. Understanding the intratumor heterogeneity is not a pure scientifically interested task. It also leads to many therapeutic advantages. Studies have shown that tumors with higher clonal diversity are associated with worse clinical outcome. Subclones with TP53 variation can lead to higher chance of chemotherapy resistant no matter how small the clone size was in the primary tumor. In this talk, I will introduce the computational issues involved with short-read data and a proposed model based on two-way mixture method to infer the evolutionary sequence of somatic mutations as well as the size of each subclone.