Aberrant fragmentomic features of circulating cell-free mitochondrial DNA as novel biomarkers for multi-cancer detection

Fragmentomic features of circulating cell free mitochondrial DNA (ccf-mtDNA) including fragmentation profile, 5’ end base preference and motif diversity are poorly understood. Here, we generated ccf-mtDNA sequencing data of 1607 plasma samples using capture-based next generation sequencing. We firstly found that fragmentomic features of ccf-mtDNA were remarkably different from those of circulating cell free nuclear DNA. Furthermore, region-specific fragmentomic features of ccf-mtDNA were observed, which was associated with protein binding, base composition and special structure of mitochondrial DNA. When comparing to non-cancer controls, six types of cancer patients exhibited aberrant fragmentomic features. Then, cancer detection models were built based on the fragmentomic features. Both internal and external validation cohorts demonstrated the excellent capacity of our model in distinguishing cancer patients from non-cancer control, with all area under curve higher than 0.9322. The overall accuracy of tissue-of-origin was 89.24% and 87.92% for six cancer types in two validation cohort, respectively. Altogether, our study comprehensively describes cancer-specific fragmentomic features of ccf-mtDNA and provides a proof-of-principle for the ccf-mtDNA fragmentomics-based multi-cancer detection and tissue-of-origin classification.