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SOMATIC MUTATIONS

Clonal competition in a confined space

Nature Genetics volume 52, pages 553–554 (2020)Cite this article

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Many normal tissues are populated by clonal expansions that compete for space. Colom et al. now show that mutant clones keep other mutant clones in check by effectively annulling one another’s advantages.

Until recently, the study of somatic evolution in healthy tissues—describing how mutations accumulate in normal cells and how their fates are shaped by selection and drift—had largely been the domain of theoreticians1,2. The microscopic evolutionary processes continuously occurring within the human body were well hidden from experimentalists because scalable methods for genomic analysis of small cell populations were lacking. However, in recent years, technical advances have opened a fascinating window onto the evolution of normal tissues. The new insights emerging from this field are poised to revolutionize our view of cancer development. Many if not all normal tissues are now understood to be colonized by clones bearing classical cancer driver mutations conferring no apparent disadvantages in terms of physiological function. Several impressive snapshots of these clone communities in explanted tissues have been published3,4,5,6,7,8,9, but very little is known about their in vivo behavior and evolution over time. Now Colom et al.10 pave the way toward an understanding of the interaction dynamics between somatic clones by investigating what happens when clonal expansions collide within a tissue.

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Fig. 1: Clonal dynamics in normal tissue.

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  1. Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Kamila Naxerova

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  1. Kamila Naxerova
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Correspondence to Kamila Naxerova.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Naxerova, K. Clonal competition in a confined space. Nat Genet 52, 553–554 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-020-0638-x

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