COShoRt movie: Cancer Genomics
Channel: Center for Omics Sciences OSR
Date: 15/03/2022

A short movie to introduce Cancer Genomics and illustrate how you can use NGS techniques in Cancer Research. 

Cancer Genomics studies the DNA differences between tumour cells and normal cells, which can be detected by genome sequencing. 
Depending on our questions, we can opt for different sequencing targets: disease-specific genes , all the coding regions or all the genome. And we have seen that different sequencing targets require diverse amounts and quality of input DNA and are characterised by different times, costs and data burden. 
 
Crucial aspects of cancer genomics analysis are:
- Needs for Control samples (to distinguish somatic alterations from germline alteration) 
- Good coverage (to confidently detect rare alterations)
- Estimate of the sample's purity (to filter out the noise introduced by the presence of non-cancerous cell types)
 
The DNA differences we can detect by bioinformatic analysis are small alterations (like SNP and indels) or large alterations (like CNV and structural rearrangements). Keep in mind that detecting alterations is pretty straightforward. Still, interpretation of results can be very challenging and require deep knowledge of the different tumour types.