Probabilistic 20/20: somatic mutation simulator

Author:Collin Tokheim
Contact:ctokhei1 AT alumni.jh.edu
Source code:GitHub
Q&A:Biostars (tag: prob2020)

The Probabibilistic 20/20 statistical test identifies genes with signficant oncogene-like and tumor suppressor gene-like mutational patterns for small somatic variants in coding regions. Putative signficant oncogenes are found through evaluating missense mutation clustering and in silico pathogenicity scores. Often highly clustered missense mutations are indicative of activating mutations. While statistically signficant tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) are found by abnormally high proportion of inactivating mutations.

Probabilistic 20/20 evaluates statistical significance by employing monte carlo simulations, which incorporates observed mutation base context. Monte carlo simulations are performed within the same gene and thus avoid building a background distribution based on other genes. This means that the statistical test can be applied to either all genes in the exome from exome sequencing or to a certain target set of genes from targeted sequencing. Additionally, the direct results of somatic mutation simulations can be accessed in a Mutation Annotation Format (MAF) file.

The Probabilistic 20/20 test has nice properties since it accounts for several factors that could effect the significance of driver genes.

  • gene length
  • mutation context
  • gene sequence (e.g. codon bias)

Contents:

Citation

Collin J. Tokheim, Nickolas Papadopoulos, Kenneth W. Kinzler, Bert Vogelstein, and Rachel Karchin. Evaluating the evaluation of cancer driver genes. PNAS 2016 ; published ahead of print November 22, 2016, doi:10.1073/pnas.1616440113

If you use the hotmaps1d command to find codons were missense mutations are significantly clustered, please cite the HotMAPS paper:

Tokheim C, Bhattacharya R, Niknafs N, Gygax DM, Kim R, Ryan M, Masica DL, Karchin R (2016) Exome-scale discovery of hotspot mutation regions in human cancer using 3D protein structure Cancer Research. Apr. 28.pii: canres.3190.2015.