CTLPScanner: a web server for chromothripsis-like pattern detection

Abstract

Chromothripsis is a recently observed phenomenon in cancer cells in which one or several chromosomes shatter into pieces with subsequent inaccurate reassembly and clonal propagation. This type of event generates a potentially vast number of mutations within a relatively short-time period, and has been considered as a new paradigm in cancer development. Despite recent advances, much work is still required to better understand the molecular mechanisms of this phenomenon, and thus an easy-to-use tool is in urgent need for automatically detecting and annotating chromothripsis. Here we present CTLPScanner, a web server for detection of chromothripsis-like pattern (CTLP) in genomic array data. The output interface presents intuitive graphical representations of detected chromosome pulverization region, as well as detailed results in table format. CTLPScanner also provides additional information for associated genes in chromothripsis region to help identify the potential candidates involved in tumorigenesis. To assist in performing meta-data analysis, we integrated over 50 000 pre-processed genomic arrays from The Cancer Genome Atlas and Gene Expression Omnibus into CTLPScanner. The server allows users to explore the presence of chromothripsis signatures from public data resources, without carrying out any local data processing. CTLPScanner is freely available at http://cgma.scu.edu.cn/CTLPScanner/.