The Evolutionary Trade-off between Stem Cell Niche Size, Aging, and Tumorigenesis

Vincent L. Cannataro, Scott A. McKinley, Colette M. St. Mary

Abstract

Many epithelial tissues within large multicellular organisms are continually replenished by small independent populations of stem cells. These stem cells divide within their niches and differentiate into the constituent cell types of the tissue, and are largely responsible for maintaining tissue homeostasis. Mutations can accumulate in stem cell niches and change the rate of stem cell division and differentiation, contributing to both aging and tumorigenesis. Here, we create a mathematical model of the intestinal stem cell niche, crypt system, and epithelium. We calculate the expected effect of fixed mutations in stem cell niches and their expected effect on tissue homeostasis throughout the intestinal epithelium over the lifetime of an organism. We find that, due to the small population size of stem cell niches, fixed mutations are expected to accumulate via genetic drift and decrease stem cell fitness, leading to niche and tissue attrition, and contributing to organismal aging. We also explore mutation accumulation at various stem cell niche sizes, and demonstrate that an evolutionary trade-off exists between niche size, tissue aging, and the risk of tumorigenesis; where niches exist at a size that minimizes the probability of tumorigenesis, at the expense of accumulating deleterious mutations due to genetic drift. Finally, we show that the probability of tumorigenesis and the extent of aging trade-off differently depending on whether mutational effects confer a selective advantage, or not, in the stem cell niche.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/059279

Evolutionary dynamics of CRISPR gene drives

Charleston Noble, Jason Olejarz, Kevin Esvelt, George Church, Martin Nowak

Abstract

The alteration of wild populations has been discussed as a solution to a number of humanity's most pressing ecological and public health concerns. Enabled by the recent revolution in genome editing, CRISPR gene drives, selfish genetic elements which can spread through populations even if they confer no advantage to their host organism, are rapidly emerging as the most promising approach. But before real-world applications are considered, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of the outcomes of drive release in nature. Toward this aim, we mathematically study the evolutionary dynamics of CRISPR gene drives. We demonstrate that the emergence of drive-resistant alleles presents a major challenge to previously reported constructs, and we show that an alternative design which selects against resistant alleles greatly improves evolutionary stability. We discuss all results in the context of CRISPR technology and provide insights which inform the engineering of practical gene drive systems.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/057281  

link: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/06/057281

 

 

tHapMix: simulating tumour samples through haplotype mixtures

Sergii Ivakhno, Camilla Colombo, Stephen Tanner, Philip Tedder, Stefano Berri, Anthony J. Cox

 

Abstract

Motivation: Large-scale rearrangements and copy number changes combined with different modes of clonal evolution create extensive somatic genome diversity, making it difficult to develop versatile and scalable variant calling tools and create well-calibrated benchmarks. Results: We developed a new simulation framework tHapMix that enables the creation of tumour sam-ples with different ploidy, purity and polyclonality features. It easily scales to simulation of hundreds of somatic genomes, while re-use of real read data preserves noise and biases present in sequencing platforms. We further demonstrate tHapMix utility by creating a simulated set of 140 somatic genomes and showing how it can be used in training and testing of somatic copy number variant calling tools. Availability and implementation: tHapMix is distributed under an open source license and can be downloaded from https://github.com/Illumina/tHapMix .

Link: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/06/057414

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/057414