Summary
Mutational signatures are patterns in the occurrence of somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) that can reflect underlying mutational processes. The SomaticSignatures package provides flexible, interoperable, and easy-to-use tools that identify such signatures in cancer sequencing data. It facilitates large-scale, cross-dataset estimation of mutational signatures, implements existing methods for pattern decomposition, supports extension through user-defined methods and integrates with Bioconductor workflows.
The R package SomaticSignatures is available as part of the Bioconductor project (R Core Team, 2014; Gentleman et al., 2004). Its documentation provides additional details on the methodology and demonstrates applications to biological datasets.