ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2025
Punctuational evolution is pervasive in distal site metastatic colonization.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reconstruction of the evolutionary landscape of biological processes involved in the early stages of the metastatic cascade.Genetics and molecular biology · 2026Article
- Evolution of Cancer Metastases via Lineage Trans-Differentiation.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Non-Linear Size Effects and Episodic Progression in the Ascending Aorta.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Protein Structural Phylogenetics.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Review
- Punctuational evolution is pervasive in distal site metastatic colonization.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The evolution of metastasis, the spread of cancer to distal sites within the body, represents a lethal stage of cancer progression. Yet, the evolutionary dynamics that shape the emergence of metastatic disease remain unresolved. Here, using single-cell lineage tracing data in combination with phylogenetic statistical methods, we show that the evolutionary trajectory of metastatic disease is littered with bursts of rapid molecular change as new cellular subpopulations appear, a pattern known as punctuational evolution. Next, by measuring punctuational evolution across the metastatic cascade, we show that punctuational effects are concentrated within the formation of secondary tumours at distal metastatic sites, suggesting that qualitatively different modes of evolution may drive primary and metastatic tumour progression. Taken as a whole, our findings provide empirical evidence for distinct patterns of molecular evolution at early and late stages of metastatic disease and our approach provides a framework to study the evolution of metastasis at a more nuanced level than has been previously possible.
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