Chromothripsis-like patterns are recurring but heterogeneously distributed features in a survey of 22,347 cancer genome screens

BackgroundChromothripsis is a recently discovered phenomenon of genomic rearrangement, possibly arising during a single genome-shattering event. This could provide an alternative paradigm in cancer development, replacing the gradual accumulation of genomic changes with a \"one-off\" catastrophic event. However, the term has been used with varying operational definitions, with the minimal consensus being a large number of locally clustered copy number aberrations. The mechanisms underlying these chromothripsis-like patterns (CTLP) and their specific impact on tumorigenesis are still poorly understood.\n\nResultsHere, we identified CTLP in 918 cancer samples, from a dataset of more than 22,000