Identification of neutral tumor evolution across cancer types

Despite extraordinary efforts to profile cancer genomes, interpreting the vast amount of genomic data in the light of cancer evolution remains challenging. Here we demonstrate that neutral tumor evolution results in a power-law distribution of the mutant allele frequencies reported by next-generation sequencing of tumor bulk samples. We find that the neutral power law fits with high precision 323 of 904 cancers from 14 types and from different...