The genetic evolution of melanoma: 48 case studies

To better understand the genetic evolution of melanoma, we microdissected and separately sequenced primary melanomas and the adjacent precursors from which they arose, allowing us to infer to order of genomic alterations that occur during the evolution of each melanoma. In total, we sequenced 230 distinct histopathologic areas from 82 patients -- 37 patients' tumor were previously analyzed (Shain et. al. New England Journal of Medicine, 2015) and 45 patients' tumors are newly sequenced and described here. (3 patients' tumors from our original study were resequenced and included here, bringing the total number of cases to 48)

A separate manuscript is currently under consideration in which we perform a meta-analysis focused on the recurrent genomic alterations that occur during the evolution of these cases. Here, we publish details pertaining to the genetic evolution of each individual patient's melanoma. This series of case studies will improve the transparency of our meta-analysis, and also serve as a resource to the melanoma research community.

We also include large supplementary tables associated with this manuscript as part of this dataset.