MEMCover: integrated analysis of mutual exclusivity and functional network reveals dysregulated pathways across multiple cancer types

The data gathered by the Pan-Cancer initiative has created an unprecedented opportunity for illuminating common features across different cancer types. However, separating tissue-specific features from across cancer signatures has proven to be challenging. One of the often-observed properties of the mutational landscape of cancer is the mutual exclusivity of cancer driving mutations. Even though studies based on individual cancer types suggested that mutually exclusive pairs often share the same functional pathway, the relationship between across cancer mutual exclusivity and functional connectivity has not been previously investigated.