Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Relationship Between Inflation and Real Economic Growth in Rwanda

peer reviewedThis study examines the impact of economic stability measures (inflation and unemployment rates) on real gross domestic product (GDP) in Rwanda. It uses quarterly data for the period of 2000Q1–2015Q4 collected from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Central Bank of Rwanda and the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR). This study concludes that inflation and unemployment have a long-run negative and significant relationship on real gross domestic product. In the long run, the coefficients are not significant at the 5% level; it is only the inflation coefficient and error which are significant. Real gross domestic product increases when inflation reduces with a p-value of 0.00266; real gross domestic product increases when unemployment reduces with a p-value of 0.09882. The coefficient from the error correction model means that the effect of the shock will reduce by 0.0483% each quarter, meaning that the effect of the shock will reduce by 19.32% in each 4th quarter. This further means that it will end at 20 quarters, that is, after a five-year period. It has to be highlighted that there is a weak relationship between real gross domestic product and both inflation and unemployment rates