Commonalities in clonal selection during normal tissue and cancer development

Clonal selection and drift (i.e. proliferation and dominance of some cell clones and extinction of others, respectively) are critical phenomena during development. To evaluate the commonalities of this phenomena during normal tissue and cancer development we recruited computational techniques to analyze both normal and cancer tissue data. Also, several models, algorithms, and tools were developed to solve different problems we faced throughout the project. The comparative analyses revealed that while there are major differences in the drivers of selection in normal and cancer tissues, some key genes are common across different tissues and even between normal and cancerous ones.