Alternatively, it may indicate that this is a passenger mutation, which has no role in carcinogenesis.
The second mutation in the doublet was drawn randomly based on a uniform distribution over the TP53 coding sequence for that exon, since it is likely to be a "hitchhiker" (passenger) mutation, rather than a driver mutation for the tumor.
This finding suggests that the single KLF5 mutation in Panc5.04 is most likely a passenger mutation, and provides additional support for KLF5 being predominantly oncogenic in pancreatic cancer.
They can be categorized in: (a) passenger mutations that are the majority and may be biologically inactive and clinically irrelevant; (b) driver mutations whose activity is required for the aberrant growth, survival and chemoresistance of human cancers.
It is important to distinguish the driver mutations from the passenger mutations; a driver mutation is defined as a mutation that is causally implicated in oncogenesis, whereas a passenger mutation is defined as a mutation that has no effect on the fitness of a clone but is present in the same genome with a driver mutation.
Gene maximum multiplicity serves as a measure of a gene's systemic occurrence and hence a gene's potential to be a driver mutation rather than a passenger mutation.
suggesting that the fusion gene is a driver mutation, not just a passenger mutation.
This implies that ALK fusion itself exerts very strong driving forces for tumorigenesis, in other words, that ALK fusion is a driver mutation, not just a passenger mutation.
We call the parameter q the passenger mutation probability, as it is the probability that a gene contains a passenger mutation.
Based on these studies, we can estimate that the majority of somatic mutations in cancer cells are likely to be passenger mutations, whereas a minority are estimated to be driver mutations [5], [7].
