Simpler and Faster Development of Tumor Phylogeny Pipelines

In the recent years there has been an increasing amount of single-cell sequencing (SCS) studies, producing a considerable number of new datasets. This has particularly affected the field of cancer analysis, where more and more papers are published using this sequencing technique that allows for capturing more detailed information regarding the specific genetic mutations on each individually sampled cell. As the amount of information increases, it is necessary to have more sophisticated and rapid tools for analyzing the samples. To this goal we developed *plastic*, an easy-to-use and quick to adapt pipeline that integrates three different steps: (1) to simplify the input data; (2) to infer tumor phylogenies; and (3) to compare the phylogenies. We have created a pipeline submodule for each of those steps, and developed new in-memory data structures that allow for easy and transparent sharing of the information across the tools implementing the above steps. While we use existing open source tools for those steps, we have extended the tool used for simplifying the input data, incorporating two machine learning procedures --- which greatly reduce the running time without affecting the quality of the downstream analysis. Moreover, we have introduced the capability of producing some plots to quickly visualize results.

Profiles of expressed mutations in single cells reveal patterns of tumor evolution and therapeutic impact of intratumor heterogeneity

Advances in single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) technologies uncovered an unexpected complexity in solid tumors, underlining the relevance of intratumor heterogeneity for cancer progression and therapeutic resistance. Heterogeneity in the mutational composition of cancer cells is well captured by tumor phylogenies, which demonstrate how distinct cell populations evolve, and, e.g. develop metastatic potential or resistance to specific treatments. Unfortunately, because of their low read coverage per cell, mutation calls that can be made from scRNAseq data are very sparse and noisy. Additionally, available tumor phylogeny reconstruction methods cannot computationally handle a large number of cells and mutations present in typical scRNAseq datasets. Finally, there are no principled methods to assess distinct subclones observed in inferred tumor phylogenies and the genomic alterations that seed them. Here we present Trisicell, a computational toolkit for scalable tumor phylogeny reconstruction and evaluation from scRNAseq as well as single cell genome or exome sequencing data. Trisicell allows the identification of reliable subtrees of a tumor phylogeny, offering the ability to focus on the most important subclones and the genomic alterations that are associated with subclonal proliferation. We comprehensively assessed Trisicell on a melanoma model by comparing the phylogeny it builds using scRNAseq data, to those using matching bulk whole exome (bWES) and transcriptome (bWTS) sequencing data from clonal sublines derived from single cells. Our results demonstrate that tumor phylogenies based on mutation calls from scRNAseq data can be robustly inferred and evaluated by Trisicell. We also applied Trisicell to reconstruct and evaluate the phylogeny it builds using scRNAseq data from melanomas of the same mouse model after treatment with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB). After integratively analyzing our cell-specific mutation calls with their expression profiles, we observed that each subclone with a distinct set of novel somatic mutations is strongly associated with a distinct developmental status. Moreover, each subclone had developed a specific ICB-resistance mechanism. These results demonstrate that Trisicell can robustly utilize scRNAseq data to delineate intratumoral heterogeneity and tumor evolution.

BiTSC2: Bayesian inference of Tumor clonal Tree by joint analysis of Single-Cell SNV and CNA data

The rapid development of single-cell DNA sequencing (scDNA-seq) technology has greatly enhanced the resolution of tumor cell profiling, providing an unprecedented perspective in characterizing intra-tumoral heterogeneity and understanding tumor progression and metastasis. However, prominent algorithms for constructing tumor phylogeny based on scDNA-seq data usually only take single nucleotide variations (SNVs) as markers, failing to consider the effect caused by copy number alterations (CNAs). Here, we propose BiTSC2, Bayesian inference of Tumor clonal Tree by joint analysis of Single-Cell SNV and CNA data. BiTSC2 takes raw reads from scDNA-seq as input, accounts for sequencing errors, models dropout rate and assigns single cells into subclones. By applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, BiTSC2 can simultaneously estimate the subclonal scCNA and scSNV genotype matrices, sub-clonal assignments and tumor subclonal evolutionary tree. In comparison with existing methods on synthetic and real tumor data, BiTSC2 shows high accuracy in genotype recovery and sub-clonal assignment. BiTSC2 also performs robustly in dealing with scDNA-seq data with low sequencing depth and variant dropout rate.

gpps: an ILP-based approach for inferring cancer progression with mutation losses from single cell data

Background Cancer progression reconstruction is an important development stemming from the phylogenetics field. In this context, the reconstruction of the phylogeny representing the evolutionary history presents some peculiar aspects that depend on the technology used to obtain the data to analyze: Single Cell DNA Sequencing data have great specificity, but are affected by moderate false negative and missing value rates. Moreover, there has been some recent evidence of back mutations in cancer: this phenomenon is currently widely ignored. Results We present a new tool, , that reconstructs a tumor phylogeny from Single Cell Sequencing data, allowing each mutation to be lost at most a fixed number of times. The General Parsimony Phylogeny from Single cell () tool is open source and available at https://github.com/AlgoLab/gpps. Conclusions provides new insights to the analysis of intra-tumor heterogeneity by proposing a new progression model to the field of cancer phylogeny reconstruction on Single Cell data.

PhISCS-BnB: a fast branch and bound algorithm for the perfect tumor phylogeny reconstruction problem

Motivation Recent advances in single-cell sequencing (SCS) offer an unprecedented insight into tumor emergence and evolution. Principled approaches to tumor phylogeny reconstruction via SCS data are typically based on general computational methods for solving an integer linear program, or a constraint satisfaction program, which, although guaranteeing convergence to the most likely solution, are very slow. Others based on Monte Carlo Markov Chain or alternative heuristics not only offer no such guarantee, but also are not faster in practice. As a result, novel methods that can scale up to handle the size and noise characteristics of emerging SCS data are highly desirable to fully utilize this technology. Results We introduce PhISCS-BnB (phylogeny inference using SCS via branch and bound), a branch and bound algorithm to compute the most likely perfect phylogeny on an input genotype matrix extracted from an SCS dataset. PhISCS-BnB not only offers an optimality guarantee, but is also 10–100 times faster than the best available methods on simulated tumor SCS data. We also applied PhISCS-BnB on a recently published large melanoma dataset derived from the sublineages of a cell line involving 20 clones with 2367 mutations, which returned the optimal tumor phylogeny in <4 h. The resulting phylogeny agrees with and extends the published results by providing a more detailed picture on the clonal evolution of the tumor. Availability and implementation https://github.com/algo-cancer/PhISCS-BnB. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Reconstructing tumor evolutionary histories and clone trees in polynomial-time with SubMARine

Tumors contain multiple subpopulations of genetically distinct cancer cells. Reconstructing their evolutionary history can improve our understanding of how cancers develop and respond to treatment. Subclonal reconstruction methods cluster mutations into groups that co-occur within the same subpopulations, estimate the frequency of cells belonging to each subpopulation, and infer the ancestral relationships among the subpopulations by constructing a clone tree. However, often multiple clone trees are consistent with the data and current methods do not efficiently capture this uncertainty; nor can these methods scale to clone trees with a large number of subclonal populations.Here, we formalize the notion of a partial clone tree that defines a subset of the pairwise ancestral relationships in a clone tree, thereby implicitly representing the set of all clone trees that have these defined pairwise relationships. Also, we introduce a special partial clone tree, the Maximally-Constrained Ancestral Reconstruction (MAR), which summarizes all clone trees fitting the input data equally well. Finally, we extend commonly used clone tree validity conditions to apply to partial clone trees and describe SubMARine, a polynomial-time algorithm producing the subMAR, which approximates the MAR and guarantees that its defined relationships are a subset of those present in the MAR. We also extend SubMARine to work with subclonal copy number aberrations and define equivalence constraints for this purpose. In contrast with other clone tree reconstruction methods, SubMARine runs in time and space that scales polynomially in the number of subclones.We show through extensive simulation and a large lung cancer dataset that the subMAR equals the MAR in > 99.9% of cases where only a single clone tree exists and that it is a perfect match to the MAR in most of the other cases. Notably, SubMARine runs in less than 70 seconds on a single thread with less than one Gb of memory on all datasets presented in this paper, including ones with 50 nodes in a clone tree.The freely-available open-source code implementing SubMARine can be downloaded at https://github.com/morrislab/submarine.Author summaryCancer cells accumulate mutations over time and consist of genetically distinct subpopulations. Their evolutionary history (as represented by tumor phylogenies) can be inferred from bulk cancer genome sequencing data. Current tumor phylogeny reconstruction methods have two main issues: they are slow, and they do not efficiently represent uncertainty in the reconstruction.To address these issues, we developed SubMARine, a fast algorithm that summarizes all valid phylogenies in an intuitive format. SubMARine solved all reconstruction problems in this manuscript in less than 70 seconds, orders of magnitude faster than other methods. These reconstruction problems included those with up to 50 subclones; problems that are too large for other algorithms to even attempt. SubMARine achieves these result because, unlike other algorithms, it performs its reconstruction by identifying an upper-bound on the solution set of trees. In the vast majority of cases, this upper bound is tight: when only a single solution exists, SubMARine converges to it > 99.9% of the time; when multiple solutions exist, our algorithm correctly recovers the uncertain relationships in more than 80% of cases.In addition to solving these two major challenges, we introduce some useful new concepts for and open research problems in the field of tumor phylogeny reconstruction. Specifically, we formalize the concept of a partial clone tree which provides a set of constraints on the solution set of clone trees; and provide a complete set of conditions under which a partial clone tree is valid. These conditions guarantee that all trees in the solution set satisfy the constraints implied by the partial clone tree.

PhyDOSE: Design of Follow-up Single-cell Sequencing Experiments of Tumors

The combination of bulk and single-cell DNA sequencing data of the same tumor enables the inference of high-fidelity phylogenies that form the input to many important downstream analyses in cancer genomics. While many studies simultaneously perform bulk and single-cell sequencing, some studies have analyzed initial bulk data to identify which mutations to target in a follow-up single-cell sequencing experiment, thereby decreasing cost. Bulk data provide an additional untapped source of valuable information, composed of candidate phylogenies and associated clonal prevalence. Here, we introduce PhyDOSE, a method that uses this information to strategically optimize the design of follow-up single cell experiments. Underpinning our method is the observation that only a small number of clones uniquely distinguish one candidate tree from all other trees. We incorporate distinguishing features into a probabilistic model that infers the number of cells to sequence so as to confidently reconstruct the phylogeny of the tumor. We validate PhyDOSE using simulations and a retrospective analysis of a leukemia patient, concluding that PhyDOSE’s computed number of cells resolves tree ambiguity even in the presence of typical single-cell sequencing errors. We also conduct a retrospective analysis on an acute myeloid leukemia cohort, demonstrating the potential to achieve similar results with a significant reduction in the number of cells sequenced. In a prospective analysis, we demonstrate that only a small number of cells suffice to disambiguate the solution space of trees in a recent lung cancer cohort. In summary, PhyDOSE proposes cost-efficient single-cell sequencing experiments that yield high-fidelity phylogenies, which will improve downstream analyses aimed at deepening our understanding of cancer biology.Author summaryCancer development in a patient can be explained using a phylogeny — a tree that describes the evolutionary history of a tumor and has therapeutic implications. A tumor phylogeny is constructed from sequencing data, commonly obtained using either bulk or single-cell DNA sequencing technology. The accuracy of tumor phylogeny inference increases when both types of data are used, but single-cell sequencing may become prohibitively costly with increasing number of cells. Here, we propose a method that uses bulk sequencing data to guide the design of a follow-up single-cell sequencing experiment. Our results suggest that PhyDOSE provides a significant decrease in the number of cells to sequence compared to the number of cells sequenced in existing studies. The ability to make informed decisions based on prior data can help reduce the cost of follow-up single cell sequencing experiments of tumors, improving accuracy of tumor phylogeny inference and ultimately getting us closer to understanding and treating cancer.