A Common Methodological Phylogenomics Framework for intra-patient heteroplasmies to infer SARS-CoV-2 sublineages and tumor clones

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Abstract

We present a common methodological framework to infer the phylogenomics from genomic data, be it reads of SARS-CoV-2 of multiple COVID-19 patients or bulk DNAseq of the tumor of a cancer patient. The commonality is in the phylogenetic retrodiction based on the genomic reads in both scenarios. While there is evidence of heteroplasmy, i.e., multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 in the same COVID-19 patient; to date, there is no evidence of sublineages recombining within the same patient. The heterogeneity in a patient’s tumor is analogous to intra-patient heteroplasmy and the absence of recombination in the cells of tumor is a widely accepted assumption. Just as the different frequencies of the genomic variants in a tumor presupposes the existence of multiple tumor clones and provides a handle to computationally infer them, we postulate that so do the different variant frequencies in the viral reads, offering the means to infer the multiple co-infecting sublineages. We describe the Concerti computational framework for inferring phylogenies in each of the two scenarios. To demonstrate the accuracy of the method, we reproduce some known results in both scenarios. We also make some additional discoveries. We uncovered new potential parallel mutation in the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In the context of cancer, we uncovered new clones harboring resistant mutations to therapy from clinically plausible phylogenetic tree in a patient.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.14.339986: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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