ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a high-level overview of cancer biology that will help understand the rationale behind the analysis approaches. Most cancers are sporadic, meaning that their initiation and development depends on somatic alterations. Cancer originates from a single cell, and thus at the beginning at least is monoclonal. Many additional useful resources have been described in a review of databases for cancer genomics. There are many useful resources for cancer bioinformatics which can help in analyzing DNA sequencing data from tumor samples and interpreting the results. Most tumors are highly heterogeneous tissues, a fact that has many important implications for the analysis of tumor data. In most cases only a few of the somatic mutations found in a tumor are true "driver" mutations that are causally implicated in oncogenesis. With hereditary forms of cancer, all cells have a heterozygous mutation in a tumor suppressor gene.
