Susanne Tilk

@SusanneTilk

Biology PhD candidate studying somatic evolution in cancer.

Joined January 2018

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    16 Sep 2019

    Really excited to share the first chapter of my PhD on how genome-wide linkage in cancer reduces the efficacy of selection via Hill-Robertson interference (HRI), with mentors , and . (1/10)

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  2. Retweeted
    Jan 29

    Ever wonder which tumor suppressor alterations impact drug responses in vivo? Check out our recent work on using improved Tuba-seq to quantify genotype-specific treatment responses in lung cancer.

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  3. Retweeted
    3 Dec 2019

    Check out the paper on G3 by the amazing & and coauthors. 1/n

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  4. Retweeted
    13 Nov 2019

    My first study on somatic mutations in corals! We found heterogeneity among different branches of individual corals. This occurs at a similar frequency as has been reported in humans. Intriguingly, for corals the most common form of that heterogeneity is losses of heterozygosity.

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  5. Retweeted
    17 Sep 2019

    I am extremely excited about this work on the way natural selection succeeds and crucially fails to weed out deleterious mutations in cancer due to the constraints posed by linkage and Hill-Robertson interference. 1/n

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  6. 16 Sep 2019

    How successful tumors overcome this deleterious load is an exciting, open question. Similar to constraints in germ-line evolution, we think that preventing protein mis-folding is an important first step. We’d love to hear what you think! (10/10)

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  7. 16 Sep 2019

    Thus, this allowed us to estimate that in elevated mutational burden tumors (>95% of cancers), deleterious passengers accumulate and confer an individually-weak, but collectively-substantial fitness cost of ~40% that impacts tumor progression. (9/10)

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  8. 16 Sep 2019

    Finally, we demonstrate that a simple evolutionary model incorporating HRI can explain these observed patterns of selection and allowed us to estimate the mean fitness effects of passengers (~1%) and drivers (~18%) – much larger than previously estimated. (8/10)

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  9. 16 Sep 2019

    Importantly, we see that attenuated selection on CNAs and SNVs is generic to tumor evolution. This pattern persists across broad and specific tumor sub-type categories. (7/10)

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  10. 16 Sep 2019

    We see the same trend in somatic CNAs. Using a dN/dS-style statistic called dE/dI (fractional overlap of CNAs in [E]xonic versus [I]ntergenic/[I]ntronic regions) – we similarly see that selection on CNAs attenuates as the mutational burden increases. (6/10)

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  11. 16 Sep 2019

    To test this idea, we calculated dN/dS in tumors stratified by their mutational burden and observe that negative and positive selection attenuates as more mutations accumulate in tumors. (5/10)

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  12. 16 Sep 2019

    Since linkage effects get stronger as mutation rates increase, tumors with elevated mutational burdens should be particularly inefficient at removing deleterious passengers due to genetic hitchhiking and Muller’s Ratchet. (4/10)

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  13. 16 Sep 2019

    We hypothesized that since tumors evolve asexually, under the constraints of genome-wide linkage, mutations are unable to be removed by negative selection (or favored by positive selection). (3/10)

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  14. 16 Sep 2019

    Here, we try to resolve why signals of negative selection are largely absent in cancer, yet pre-dominant in the human germ-line. (2/10)

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  15. Retweeted

    Today at petrov lab meeting we explored a very important question...which spicy Cheeto is spicier? We double blinded and controlled for Cheeto size but we’re still really confused about whos spicier. , can you help us out?

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  16. Retweeted
    8 Feb 2019

    Excited to share our new paper on clonal replacement and heterogeneity through neoadjuvant therapy in Her2+ breast cancer: . Great work from and Katherine McNamara and the rest of the team!

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  17. Retweeted
    14 Dec 2018

    We have a new paper on bioRxiv today. It’s not a paper I was planning to write during my first semester as a postdoc. (1/n)

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  18. Retweeted

    The Geiler-Samerotte lab is recruiting graduate students and postdocs! Graduate students apply here by December 1rst: Postdocs apply here:

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  19. Retweeted

    COLBERT (control of lineages by barcode enabled recombinant transcription) for cancer research!

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  20. Retweeted

    Christopher McFarland of talks about using TuBa-Seq + CRISPR/Cas9 + modeling to study genetic drivers of lung cancer evolution

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