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arXiv · 2309.06355

Single-cell mutational burden distributions in birth-death processes

Christo Morison·Dudley Stark·Weini Huang
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Abstract

Genetic mutations are footprints of tumour growth. While mutation data in bulk samples has been used to infer evolutionary parameters hard to measure in vivo, the advent of single-cell data has led to strong interest in the mutational burden distribution (MBD) among tumour cells. We introduce dynamical matrices and recurrence relations to integrate this single-cell MBD with known statistics, and derive new analytical expressions. Surprisingly, we find that the shape of the MBD is driven by cell lineage-level stochasticity rather than by the distribution of mutations in each cell division.

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Christo Morison, Dudley Stark, Weini Huang. 2023-09-12. Single-cell mutational burden distributions in birth-death processes. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013241

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