ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Evolution in health and medicine Sackler colloquium: Somatic evolutionary genomics: mutations during development cause highly variable genetic mosaicism with risk of cancer and neurodegeneration.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 94 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
94 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 192 citations in OpenAlex.
- Deep representation learning for temporal inference in cancer omics: a systematic literature review.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Pooled it
- Somatic mosaicism in ALS and FTD identifies focal mutations associated with widespread degeneration.Nature genetics · 2026Article
- DNA methylation in invertebrate genomes and cell lineage plasticity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A Test of the Adaptive Lag Hypothesis of the Evolution of Cancer Suppression and Lifespan in Dog Breeds.Genes · 2026Article
- In Vitro Cytogenetic Assays: Chromosomal Aberrations and Micronucleus Tests.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Quantitative and sensitive sequencing of somatic mutations induced by a maize transposon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Probability and Neurodegeneration: Alzheimer's Disease and Huntington's Disease.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Cancer Prevalence across Vertebrates.Cancer discovery · 2025Article
- Cell-cell fusion in cancer: The next cancer hallmark?The international journal of biochemistry & cell biology · 2024Review
- A microglia clonal inflammatory disorder in Alzheimer's Disease.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Onco-Breastomics: An Eco-Evo-Devo Holistic Approach.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Cancer Prevalence Across Vertebrates.Research square · 2023Article
- Viral vectors and extracellular vesicles: innate delivery systems utilized in CRISPR/Cas-mediated cancer therapy.Cancer gene therapy · 2023Review
- Opinion: more mouse models and more translation needed for ALS.Molecular neurodegeneration · 2023Review
- The origins and functional effects of postzygotic mutations throughout the human life span.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Common anti-cancer therapies induce somatic mutations in stem cells of healthy tissue.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Analysis of low-level somatic mosaicism reveals stage and tissue-specific mutational features in human development.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Review
- Mutation or not, what directly establishes a neoplastic state, namely cellular immortality and autonomy, still remains unknown and should be prioritized in our research.Journal of Cancer · 2022Review
34 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Somatic mutations must happen often during development because of the large number of cell divisions to expand from a single-cell zygote to a full organism. A mutation in development carries forward to all descendant cells, causing genetic mosaicism. Widespread genetic mosaicism may influence diseases that derive from a few genetically altered cells, such as cancer. I show how to predict the expected amount of mosaicism and the variation in mosaicism between individuals. I then calculate the predicted risk of cancer derived from developmental mutations. The calculations show that a significant fraction of cancer in later life likely arises from developmental mutations in early life. In addition, much of the variation in the risk of cancer between individuals may arise from variation in the degree of genetic mosaicism set in early life. I also suggest that certain types of neurodegeneration, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), may derive from a small focus of genetically altered cells. If so, then the risk of ALS would be influenced by developmental mutations and the consequent variation in genetic mosaicism. New technologies promise the ability to measure genetic mosaicism by sampling a large number of cellular genomes within an individual. The sampling of many genomes within an individual will eventually allow one to reconstruct the cell lineage history of genetic change in a single body. Somatic evolutionary genomics will follow from this technology, providing new insight into the origin and progression of disease with increasing age.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.