Motivation: DNA sequencing of multiple samples from the same tumor provides data to analyze the process of clonal evolution in the population of cells that give rise to a tumor.

Results: We formalize the problem of reconstructing the clonal evolution of a tumor using single-nucleotide mutations as the variant allele frequency (VAF) factorization problem. We derive a combinatorial characterization of the solutions to this problem and show that the problem is NP-complete. We derive an integer linear programming solution to the VAF factorization problem in the case of error-free data and extend this solution to real data with a probabilistic model for errors. The resulting AncesTree algorithm is better able to identify ancestral relationships between individual mutations than existing approaches, particularly in ultra-deep sequencing data when high read counts for mutations yield high confidence VAFs.

Availability and implementation: An implementation of AncesTree is available at: http://compbio.cs.brown.edu/software.

Contact: braphael@brown.edu

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.