Michael Nicholson, michael.nicholson@ed.ac.uk
Tibor Antal, tibor.antal@ed.ac.uk
Project Description
Determining when cancer associated DNA mutations arise, and what their consequences are, is critical for a variety of clinical needs, such as the early detection of cancer. For a particular class of mutations, copy number alterations (CNAs), it appears that these often occur in a short time window, years before the onset of cancer. Why this happens is unclear, as is the growth advantage imbued by CNAs to cancer cells. Using a probabilistic modelling approach, this project will investigate why CNAs occur rapidly in some cancer types, and measure the effect they have on tumour growth. This will involve simulation, analytic methods, and bioinformatic analyses. The computational modelling will be combined with state-of-the-art single cell DNA sequencing datasets.
