MetaMutationalSigs: comparison of mutational signature refitting results made easy.

Abstract

The analysis of mutational signatures is becoming increasingly common in cancer genetics, with emerging implications in cancer evolution, classification, treatment decision and prognosis. Recently, several packages have been developed for mutational signature analysis, with each using different methodology and yielding significantly different results. Because of the non-trivial differences in tools' refitting results, researchers may desire to survey and compare the available tools, in order to objectively evaluate the results for their specific research question, such as which mutational signatures are prevalent in different cancer types. Due to the need for effective comparison of refitting mutational signatures, we introduce a user-friendly software that can aggregate and visually present results from different refitting packages. MetaMutationalSigs is implemented using R and python and is available for installation using Docker and available at: https://github.com/EESI/MetaMutationalSigs.