To investigate the genetic changes associated with AML relapse, and to determine whether clonal evolution contributes to relapse, we performed whole-genome sequencing of primary tumour–relapse pairs and matched skin samples from eight patients, including unique patient identifier (UPN) 933124, whose primary tumour mutations were previously reported3. Informed consent explicit for whole-genome sequencing was obtained for all patients on a protocol approved by the Washington University Medical School Institutional Review Board. We obtained >25× haploid coverage and >97% diploid coverage for each sample (Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Information). These patients were from five different French–American–British haematological subtypes, with elapsed times of 235–961 days between initial diagnosis and relapse (Supplementary Table 2a, b).
Candidate somatic events in the primary tumour and relapse genomes were identified4, 5 and selected for hybridization capture-based validation using methods described in Supplementary Information. Deep sequencing of the captured target DNAs from skin (the matched normal tissue), primary tumour and relapse tumour specimens6 (Supplementary Table 3) yielded a median of 590-fold coverage per site. The average number of mutations and structural variants was 539 (range 118–1,292) per case (Fig. 1a).