Fig. 1: Phylogenetic inference reveals CTC cluster oligoclonality in carcinoma patient samples and breast cancer xenografts.
From: Phylogenetic inference reveals clonal heterogeneity in circulating tumor cell clusters
a, Schematic representation of clonal architectures of CTCs during cancer metastasis. b, Experimental and computational strategy for deriving phylogenetic trees from CTC mutational profiling. RBC, red blood cell. c, Best-fitting phylogenetic tree (simplified) for patient with breast cancer ‘Br61’ obtained with CTC-SCITE, highlighting three CTC clusters inferred as oligoclonal after statistical evaluation of the probability of branching evolution among their constituent cells. Cell colors reflect CTC cluster identity. Genes with moderate or high predicted functional impact on protein activity are depicted. Oncogenic drivers predicted by the Cancer Genome Interpreter are highlighted in red. Panels a–c are created with BioRender.com. d, Proportion of monoclonal and oligoclonal CTC clusters (inner circle) inferred for patient samples (left) and breast cancer xenograft samples (right). For oligoclonal CTC clusters, the fraction of CTC clusters with low, moderate and high predicted functional impact of lineage-defining mutations is depicted (outer circle). The total number of examined CTC clusters (n) for each cancer type and xenograft model is provided.
