PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Saioa López
AU  - Emilia Lim
AU  - Ariana Huebner
AU  - Michelle Dietzen
AU  - Thanos Mourikis
AU  - Thomas B.K. Watkins
AU  - Andrew Rowan
AU  - Sally M. Dewhurst
AU  - Nicolai J. Birkbak
AU  - Gareth A. Wilson
AU  - Mariam Jamal-Hanjani
AU  - Charles Swanton
AU  - on behalf of TRACERx Consortium
AU  - Nicholas McGranahan
TI  - Whole Genome Doubling mitigates Muller’s Ratchet in Cancer Evolution
AID  - 10.1101/513457
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 513457
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/07/513457.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/07/513457.full
AB  - Whole genome doubling (WGD) is a prevalent macro-evolutionary event in cancer, involving a doubling of the entire chromosome complement. However, despite its prevalence and clinical prognostic relevance, the evolutionary selection pressures for WGD have not been investigated. Here, we explored whether WGD may act to mitigate the irreversible, inexorable ratchet-like, accumulation of deleterious mutations in essential genes. Utilizing 1050 tumor regions from 816 non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC), we temporally dissect mutations to determine their temporal acquisition in relation to WGD. We find evidence for strong negative selection against homozygous loss of essential cancer genes prior to WGD. However, mutations in essential genes occurring after duplication were not subject to significant negative selection, consistent with WGD providing a buffering effect, decreasing the likelihood of homozygous loss. Finally, we demonstrate that loss of heterozygosity and temporal dissection of mutations can be exploited to identify signals of positive selection in lung, breast, colorectal cancer and other cancer types, enabling the elucidation of novel tumour suppressor genes and a deeper characterization of known cancer genes.