A Spatial Mutation Model with Increasing Mutation Rates

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a spatial cancer model on a torus with increasing mutation rates, deriving asymptotic waiting times for cells to accumulate mutations and the distribution of mutation distances, generalizing previous uniform-rate models.

Contribution

It extends prior work by considering increasing mutation rates and provides asymptotic waiting times and spatial mutation distributions in a spatial cancer model.

Findings

Asymptotic waiting time for first cell with k mutations

Distribution of spatial distances between mutations

Generalization to increasing mutation rates

Abstract

We consider a spatial model of cancer in which cells are points on the $d$-dimensional torus $\mathcal{T}=[0,L]^d$, and each cell with $k-1$ mutations acquires a $k$th mutation at rate $\mu_k$. We will assume that the mutation rates $\mu_k$ are increasing, and we find the asymptotic waiting time for the first cell to acquire $k$ mutations as the torus volume tends to infinity. This paper generalizes results on waiting for $k\geq 3$ mutations by Foo, Leder, and Schweinsberg, who considered the case in which all of the mutation rates $\mu_k$ were the same. In addition, we find the limiting distribution of the spatial distances between mutations for certain values of the mutation rates.