Tumor heterogeneity assessed by sequencing and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) data

Computational reconstruction of clonal evolution in cancers has become a crucial tool for understanding how tumors initiate and progress and how this process varies across patients. The field still struggles, however, with special challenges of applying phylogenetic methods to cancers, such as the prevalence and importance of copy number alteration (CNA) and structural variation events in tumor evolution, which are difficult to profile accurately by prevailing sequencing methods in such a way that subsequent reconstruction by phylogenetic inference algorithms is accurate.