improving the prediction of the functional impact of cancer mutations by baseline tolerance transformation

high-throughput prioritization of cancer-causing mutations (drivers) is a key challenge of cancer genome projects,due to the number of somatic variants detected in tumors. one important step in this task is to assess thefunctional impact of tumor somatic mutations. a number of computational methods have been employed for thatpurpose, although most were originally developed to distinguish disease-related nonsynonymous single nucleotidevariants (nssnvs) from polymorphisms. our new method, transformed functional impact score for cancer(transfic), improves the assessment of the functional impact of tumor nssnvs by taking into account the baselinetolerance of genes to functional variants.