Figure 5

Accumulation of chromosome aberrations during breast cancer progression. Fifteen pairs of primary breast carcinomas and ipsilateral recurrences were analyzed with the TuMult algorithm. Patients are denoted as in the original article by Bollet et al. [18]. (a) In patient P14, all the aberrations of the primary tumor were found in the recurrence, consistent with a linear evolution. (b) In patient P13, both the primary tumor and the recurrence display specific events, implying that the recurrence was not directly descended from the primary tumor. (c) The proportion of all the aberrations in the tree occurring before the common precursor (white), between the common precursor and the primary tumor (blue hatched) or between the common precursor and the recurrence (red hatched) is presented for each of the 15 patients. P14 is the only example of linear evolution among the 15 trees. (d) Boxplots of the number of aberrations occurring at each step in tumor progression trees. CP, in the common precursor; PT, between the common precursor and the primary tumor; IR, between the common precursor and the ipsilateral recurrence. **P-value < 0.01, as determined in a two-tailed paired t-test.