Fig. 1.

Proposed mechanism of survival advantage underlying oncogene-TSG clustering. An oncogene and a tumor-suppressor gene (TSG) in close physical proximity (denoted by A) would have a higher chance of co-amplification or co-deletion than those far apart (denoted by B) given a fixed size of gained or lost region (red color). It is conjectured that such co-amplification or co-deletion will nullify the pro-tumorigenic effect of focal copy number aberrations.