PurBayes: estimating tumor cellularity and subclonality in next-generation sequencing data

SUMMARY: We have developed a novel Bayesian method, PurBayes, to estimate tumor purity and detect intratumor heterogeneity based on next-generation sequencing data of paired tumor-normal tissue samples, which uses finite mixture modeling methods. We demonstrate our approach using simulated data and discuss its performance under varying conditions. AVAILABILITY: PurBayes is implemented as an R package, and source code is available for download through CRAN at http://cran.r-project.org/package=PurBayes. CONTACT: larson.nicholas@mayo.edu SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available online at Bioinformatics online.