Resumen de Cancer evolution: no room for negative selection

Samuel F. Bakhoum, Dan A. Landau

• In this issue of Cell, Martincorena et al. and Campbell et al. interrogated the selection dynamics during tumor evolution using large-scale genomics datasets. They found that somatic mutations in cancer are largely neutral, highlighting a near-complete absence of negative selection. Neutral evolution enables tolerance of hypermutation, which defines a surprisingly large fraction of adult cancer.