Oncology

Besides the chromosomes, cancer cells also contain extrachromosomal DNA. These ecDNA pieces are replicated at every round of cell division but unlike chromosomes, their distribution to the daughter cells is not controlled by the centromeres. As a result, the dynamics of ecDNA copy numbers distribution is stochastic.

Papers

The evolutionary dynamics of extrachromosomal DNA in human cancers. Joshua T. Lange, John C. Rose, Celine Y. Chen, Yuriy Pichugin, Liangqi Xie, Jun Tang, King L. Hung, Kathryn E. Yost, Quanming Shi, Marcella L. Erb, Utkrisht Rajkumar, Sihan Wu, Sabine Taschner-Mandl, Marie Bernkopf, Charles Swanton, Zhe Liu, Weini Huang, Howard Y. Chang, Vineet Bafna, Anton G. Henssen, Benjamin Werner & Paul S. Mischel. Nature Genetics, 2022. (link)

Stochastic dynamics of extra-chromosomal DNA. Pichugin, Y., Huang, W., and Werner, B. bioRxiv, 2019. (link)