Wenjie Sun

Background Mutations drive the initiation and development of the tumor. And the mutations accumulate during tumor growth. The cancer environment selects tumor cells, and the environment selects specific cells to become clones. In a tumor, the clone composition differs between regions, resulting in tumor genetic heterogeneity within the tumor. Studying cancer genetic heterogeneity can help people understand the process of tumor initiation and development. And researcher can better know the therapy by looking into how treatment impacts the cancer genetic heterogeneity. Because of a clonal specific mutation present in the same population of cells, they have similar VAF in one sample.  And the trend of a clone specific mutation between samples is consistent. Therefore, by clustering the mutations by the variant allele frequency (VAF, more about sequencing and VAF ), we can identify the clones. The sequence of mutations also can be inferred by comparing the VAF mutations of these