Monovar- This New Computer Program Is Here To Beat Cancer

Short Bytes: Monovar is a sophisticated algorithm to detect single nucleotide variants (SVNs) in cancer cells. Written in python, this program can help in providing a more personalized treatment to cancer patients by pinpointing important variations in a single cancer cell.

The current technology being used to detect DNA mutations in cancer cells analyzes millions of cells to arrive at some definite conclusions. To make this process more efficient, the researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have come up with a new method.

Called Monovar Method, this computer program can spot DNA mutations taking place in a single cancer cell and pinpoint important variations.

This new and sophisticated program can help our doctors take a more personalized approach to cancer treatment before going for methods like chemotherapy.

Unlike the existing next-generation sequencing techniques that measure genome from millions of cells, Monovar method examines data from multiple single cells. This allows the doctors to spot important issues that normally go undetected in the noise.

The new Monovar method uses a technology called single cell sequencing (SCS). SCS also finds its applications in other fields of medicine like microbiology, neurobiology, and immunology.

Monovar is able to detect single nucleotide variants (SNVs), which is a very minute kind of DNA variation. SNVs play an important role in cancer treatment as they affect how a patient develops the disease and responds to the medication.

By helping in detecting SNVs more accurately, more personalized treatments could act as a better choice.

You can take a look at Monovar program online and see how it works. Written in python, here’s what the Bitbucket description of Monovar program says:

Monovar is a single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection and genotyping algorithm for single-cell DNA sequencing data. It takes a list of bam files as input and outputs a vcf file containing the detected SNVs.

Intelligent algorithms and big data applications are already being used in the statistical analysis of cancer cells. Let’s hope that Monovar method makes the cancer detection and treatment process easier.

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