PNAS: Calculating the path of cancer

Biologists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) are using a mathematical method developed in the laboratory of CSHL assistant professor David McCandlish to find solutions to a series of biological problems

"This is one of the real attractions of mathematical research.

All of these questions involve the possibility of mapping different variants on a biological subject: for example, in a particular protein, which combination of mutations is most likely to occur, or in the same cancer cell, which chromosomal mutations are most often at the same time Appeared

Mcandlish explained the basic problems his team is using mathematics to solve:

"Sometimes, if you make a mutation to a protein sequence, it will not do anything

The methods they developed can be used to interpret data from experiments that measure how hundreds of thousands of different combinations of mutations affect protein function

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, began with a conversation with two other CSHL colleagues: CSHL’s Jason Sheltzer and Associate Professor Justin Kinney

DOI

10.

Article title

Field-theoretic density estimation for biological sequence space with applications to 5′ splice site diversity and aneuploidy in cancer