The goal when employing biological validation procedures is to detect putative somatic variants and to assess, as precisely as possible, the frequency of each variant in that tissue of origin. Biological validation can (i) determine whether certain individuals in the population are more prone to somatic variation than others, (ii) investigate whether different areas of the brain and/or specific brain cell types have varying amounts and types of particular forms of somatic variation, (iii) assess whether developmental timing contributes to somatic variation, and (iv) reveal whether somatic variations increase as a function of the number of cell divisions and/or a function of age in postmitotic neurons.
