Quantifying Clonal and Subclonal Passenger Mutations in Cancer Evolution
Fig 4
Predicted and observed numbers of subclonal mutations in colorectal cancer.
Exome sequencing data for two colorectal cancers from the TCGA dataset, (A) microsatellite stable (MSS) and (B) microsatellite instable (MSI), show the corrected allele fraction of each detected mutation (observed allele fraction divided by purity). Mutations with allele frequency of 25% or more may be clonal [34] and mutations with corrected allele frequency below 12% can be difficult to detect reliably. Thus we focus on mutations with fractions between 0.12 and 0.25, and plot the number of mutations with fraction between α and 0.25 as a function of α. The data are fit to the formula for the number of mutations with the corresponding allele frequency Eq (7). The best fit for and its corresponding 95% confidence interval is shown for each sample.