Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cancer Phylogenetic Analysis Based On Rna-Seq Data, Tingting Zhai

Theses and Dissertations--Statistics

Studying tumor evolution is a major task to understand the biological mechanism of carcinogenesis, develop new cancer therapies, and prevent drug resistance. We focus on two important questions in tumor evolution. The first question is to quantify intra-tumor heterogeneity, where multiple subclones of tumor cells with distinct transcriptomic profiles. Another question is to estimate the temporal order of alteration of key cancer pathways during tumor evolution. We present a new statistical method to 1) reconstruct the evolutionary history and population frequency of the subclonal lineages of tumor cells and 2) infer temporal order of pathway alterations in tumor evolution for …