A genomic view of mosaicism and human disease

Genomic technologies, including next-generation sequencing (NGS) and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarrays, have provided unprecedented opportunities to assess genomic variation among, and increasingly within, individuals. It has long been known that cancer is a mosaic genetic disorder, but mosaicism is now apparent in a diverse range of other clinical disorders, as indicated by their tissue distributions and inheritance patterns. Recent technical advances have uncovered the causative mosaic variant underlying many of these conditions and have provided insight into the pervasiveness of mosaicism in normal individuals. Here, we discuss the clinical and molecular classes of mosaicism, their detection and the biological insights gained from these studies.