bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.19.444811; this version posted May 21, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Levatić et al. (2021) bioRxiv Mutational signatures are markers of drug sensitivity of cancer cells Jurica Levatić1, Marina Salvadores1, Francisco Fuster-Tormo1, Fran Supek1,2,* 1 Genome Data Science, Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, C/ Baldiri Reixac 10, Barcelona 08028, Spain. 2 Catalan Institution for Advanced Studies (ICREA), Passeig de Lluís Companys, 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain. * correspondence to:
[email protected] Abstract Genomic analyses have revealed mutational signatures that are associated with DNA maintenance gone awry, a common occurrence in tumors. Because cancer therapeutics often target synthesis of DNA building blocks, DNA replication or DNA repair, we hypothesized that mutational signatures would make useful markers of drug sensitivity. We rigorously tested this hypothesis by a global analysis of various drug screening and genetic screening data sets, derived from cancer cell line panels. We introduce a novel computational method that detects mutational signatures in cell lines by stringently adjusting for the confounding germline mutational processes, which are difficult to remove when healthy samples from the same individuals are not available. This revealed many associations between diverse mutational signatures and drug activity in cancer cell lines, which are comparably or more numerous than associations with classical genetic features such as cancer driver mutations or copy number alterations.