This is my first rotation at the Sanger institute, under the Cancer, Aging and Somatic Mutations programme. I was part of the Mutographs team and supervised by Mike Stratton and Sarah Moody.

Our cells are exposed to many mutagens - some are extrinsic, such as UV light and tobacco smoke while some are intrinsic, like APOBEC, a substance our B cells use to mutate itself (to deal with pathogens). These mutagens could leave distinctive patterns on our mutation profiles - check out the COSMIC mutational signatures. This is particularly obvious in the context of cancer. During the 11 weeks with Mutographs, I looked at the geographical differences in mutation patterns in different cancers.

Software

R packages I wrote for use in this rotation

• MutationsR: works with mutations data in R, especially string representations of mutations.
• UnsupLearnR: what a weird name, but it's a helper for unsupervised learning analyses like PCA and K-means (Most likely I will continue developing and maintaining it in the future)
• graphicsPLr: colour and shaped pickers when you're particularly lazy about choosing colours...

Results

Stay tuned for updates on the results