, the team is now working on more regional specificity and refining their software for individual genomic sequences.
Krasnitz and CSHL Postdoctoral Fellow Pascal Belleau are working to reveal the genealogical connections between cancer and race or ethnicity. They’ve developed Krasnitz’s team trained their software tools using hybrid DNA profiles. They created these profiles from cancerous and unrelated cancer-free genomes of a known background. They then tested the software’s performance against pancreatic, ovarian, breast, and blood cancer specimens from patients with known ancestry. The team found the software matched their hybrid profiles to continental populations with over 95% accuracy.
Krasnitz and Belleau recently joined a colorectal cancer study in collaboration with Northwell Health and SUNY Downstate Medical Center. The study allows them to explore how colorectal cancer mutates genes in different ways depending on specific races or ethnicities. They hope to further refine their software to infer ancestry of not only whole genomes but every individual sequence therein.