Wednesday, 16th November, 2011, 11:00-12:00

Co-Alterations in Human Cancer

Big efforts are being made to reveal the alterations that have occurred in the genomes of cancerous cells. Especially the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) will contribute by collecting data in a standardized way and make it publicly available.

With the already available data, an abundance of alterations of different types have been found – some so-called driver alterations that drive the cell towards its cancerous state and some passenger alterations that are a by-product of the cancer development.

It is an ongoing challenge to discriminate driver from the passenger mutations even though a variety of methods have been proposed up to this day. These include methods based on recurrence of alterations (RBM) across a cohort of samples and sequence based methods (SBM) that assess the impact of mutations on the functionality of the protein product.

We are working on how to detect the coaltered pairs that are candidates for having a synergistic effect. We hypothesize that some driver alterations may only have their driver effect when occurring with a certain other driver alteration – synergistic drivers. This could be reflected by either the strict co-occurrence of the driver alterations along the samples and/or similar expression patterns of reporter genes of the candidate drivers.

Speaker: Michael P. Schroeder

Room 473.10_Aula