Embryonic origin of cancer in newborn twins

ABSTRACT Studying monozygotic twins who present with identical cancers informs on the developmental origins of childhood tumours. Here, we performed whole genome sequencing on multiple tumour, normal, and placental samples to reconstruct the phylogeny of a soft tissue cancer that spread in utero between monozygotic twins. This generalisable and scalable approach allows us to dissect the earliest stages of twinning, revealing unexpected asymmetrical contributions of embryonic lineages to the placenta and each twin. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Funder Information Declared Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 223135/Z/21/Z, 220540/Z/20/A, 206194 Copyright The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.