Introduction to Cancer Somatic Mutation Analyses

Somatic mutations are a driving force for cancer development. The profiling of somatic mutations based on second-generation sequencing has provided an unprecedented opportunity to enhance the understanding of cancer biology and identify new drug targets. In this talk, I will provide a brief introduction to bioinformatics analyses of somatic mutation data, including the detection of somatic mutations, identification of significantly mutated genes, discovery of driver mutations, delineation of the temporal order of pathway mutations, and reconstruction of phylogenetic trees.