| Intra-tumoral genetic heterogeneity has long been recognized, yet remains poorly understood. This has primarily been due to the lack of sensitive technologies to measure it. Genome wide analysis at the level of single cells has recently emerged as a powerful tool to dissect cancer genome heterogeneity. However, to be truly transformative, single cell approaches must accommodate the analysis of large numbers of single cells. Here, using integrative informatics and molecular biology approaches this study presents a robust, low-cost, and high-throughput method to retrieve the genome-wide copy number landscape of hundreds of single cancer cells. Application of the method to human cancer cell lines and clinical cancer tissue illustrates the underlying genetic heterogeneity present in both and further reveals mosaicism of chromosomal amplifications in clinical cancer samples. The capacity of the method to facilitate the rapid profiling of hundreds and thousands of single cell genomes is bound to illuminate the biology of intra-tumoral heterogeneity. |
