We developed a novel algorithm, PurityEst, to infer the tumor purity level from the allelic differential representation of heterozygous loci with somatic mutations in a human tumor sample with a matched normal tissue using next-generation sequencing data. We applied our tool to a whole cancer genome sequencing datasets and demonstrated the accuracy of PurityEst compared with DNA copy number-based estimation.
Availability: PurityEst has been implemented in PERL and is available at http://odin.mdacc.tmc.edu/~xsu1/PurityEst.html.