Fig. 10

a, b, c Karyotypic evidence that the metastasis WM-266-4 is an individual subspecies of melanoma WM-115. The karyotypic theory of metastasis predicts that metastases have individual clonal karyotypes that differ from those of parental cancers in individual metastasis-specific aneusomies. To test this theory we have compared karyotype-arrays of the melanoma metastasis WM-266-4 to that of the primary cancer WM-115 prepared as described for Fig. 9. Figure 10 a, b and the attached table show that 80 to 100% of the chromosomes of the metastasis WM-266-4 and of the cancer WM-115 were clonal, and that cancer and metastasis both formed very similar clonal patterns. The karyotype of the metastasis differed from that of the primary cancer in about 13 of an average of 31 aneusomies (Fig. 10 a, b , c and Table 1). The copy numbers of the non-clonal chromosomes differed from clonal averages ± 1; there were also several non-clonal marker chromosomes (Fig. 10 a, b , c). These non-clonal chromosomes represent the ongoing karyotypic variation predicted by the inherent variability of cancer-specific aneuploidy (see Fig. 10 a, b and specifically Fig. 10c , and Background). We conclude that the melanoma metastasis WM-266-4 is a subspecies of the parental melanoma WM-115