We began focusing on this issue several years ago, initially developing ad hoc techniques20, 21. We subsequently developed a fully quantitative method (ABSOLUTE) and applied it to several cancer genome analysis projects, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. ABSOLUTE provides a foundation for integrative genomic analysis of cancer genome alterations on an absolute (cellular) basis. We used these methods to correlate purity and ploidy estimates with expression subtypes and to develop statistical power calculations and use them to select well-powered samples for whole-genome sequencing in several published 22, 23, 24, and numerous ongoing projects, including breast, prostate, and skin cancer genome characterization. Recently, we extended ABSOLUTE to infer the multiplicity of somatic point-mutations in integer allelic units per cancer-cell.
