Cancer's silent progression: research delves into evolutionary clues in breast cancer Nature breastcancer cancer evolution evolutionaryclues research
By Pooja Toshniwal PahariaAug 2 2023Reviewed by Lily Ramsey, LLM In a recent study published in Nature, researchers performed phylogenetic analyses to trace the evolution of breast cancer and precursor lesions.
Phylogenetic studies using multiple sampling of tumor samples are limited in mapping the timing of cancer clones' emergence or tracking non-cancerous clones' fates.Whole-genome sequencing was performed on several microscale specimens obtained from laser-capture microdissection of cancerous and clonally-associated benign breast lesions with an average diameter of three millimeters and normal lobules.
Related StoriesPhylogenetic analysis was done on surgical specimens containing pathologically proven cancer and multifocal non-cancer proliferative lesions . Lastly, the team used public data from the Cancer Genome Atlas to define clinical and pathological aspects of der breast tumors and study their function in breast cancer etiology.
The mutation distribution in 15 organoids revealed 58,385 single nucleotide variants and 3,955 small insertions and deletions as clonal somatic variants, including four PIK3CA mutations. PIK3CA mutations influenced the mutational rate, which elevated the SNV count by 210 and reduced the indel accumulation rate by 45%.