Multiregional Tumor Trees Are Not Phylogenies

João M Alves; Tamara Prieto; David Posada

doi:10.1016/j.trecan.2017.06.004

Multiregional Tumor Trees Are Not Phylogenies

Trends Cancer. 2017 Aug;3(8):546-550. doi: 10.1016/j.trecan.2017.06.004. Epub 2017 Jul 17.

Authors

João M Alves¹, Tamara Prieto¹, David Posada²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology and Biomedical Research Center (CINBIO), University of Vigo, Spain; Galicia Sur Health Research Institute, Vigo, Spain.
² Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology and Biomedical Research Center (CINBIO), University of Vigo, Spain; Galicia Sur Health Research Institute, Vigo, Spain. Electronic address: dposada@uvigo.es.

Abstract

Tumor samples most often comprise a mixture of different cell lineages. Multiregional trees built from bulk mutational profiles do not consider this heterogeneity and can potentially lead to erroneous evolutionary inferences, including biased timing of somatic mutations, spurious parallel mutation events, and/or incorrect chronological ordering of metastatic events.

Keywords: bulk sequencing; intratumor genetic heterogeneity; multiregional studies; somatic evolution; tumor phylogenies.

MeSH terms

Biopsy
Cell Lineage / genetics*
Clonal Evolution*
Exome / genetics*
Genetic Heterogeneity*
High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
Humans
Mutation
Neoplasms / genetics*
Neoplasms / pathology
Phylogeny
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide