The somatic mutation landscape of the human body

Abstract

Somatic mutations in healthy tissues contribute to aging, neurodegeneration, and cancer initiation, yet remain largely uncharacterized. To gain a better understanding of their distribution and functional impacts, we leveraged the genomic information contained in the transcriptome to uniformly call somatic mutations from over 7,500 tissue samples, representing 36 distinct tissues. This catalog, containing over 280,000 mutations, revealed a wide diversity of tissuespecific mutation profiles associated with gene expression levels and chromatin states. We found pervasive negative selection acting on missense and nonsense mutations, except for mutations previously observed in cancer samples, which were under positive selection and were highly enriched in many healthy tissues. These findings reveal fundamental patterns of tissue-specific somatic evolution and shed light on aging and the earliest stages of tumorigenesis.