Detecting and quantifying clonal selection in normal and cancer stem cells

As DNA variants accumulate in somatic stem cells, become selected or evolve neutrally, they may ultimately alter tissue function. When and how selection occurs in homeostatic tissues, and when, and how, it initiates malignant transformation, are incompletely understood questions. In my talk I will introduce a mathematical inference approach to detect selected clones in homeostatic tissues and quantify their evolution from deep genome sequencing data. I will then show how we applied this approach to inferring the evolutionary origin of childhood cancers and discuss implications of our findings for early detection.