Fig. 12

a, b, c, d Karyotypic evidence that the metastasis M-425 is an individual subspecies of medulloblastoma M-458. 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 metastasis M-425 to that of the primary cancer M-458 prepared as described for Fig. 9. Figure 12 a, b and the attached table show that 55–90% of the chromosomes of the cancer M-458 and 70–100% of the chromosomes of the metastasis M-425 were clonal, and that cancer and metastasis formed similar clonal patterns. The fact that the karyotype of M-425 was more clonal than that of M-458, again supports the view that M-425 is the metastasis and M-458 the original cancer (See comment regarding this question in section "Karyotypic and phenotypic relationships between metastases and parental cancers"). The karyotype of the metastasis differed from that of the primary cancer in about 17 of an average of 28 M-425 aneusomies (Fig. 12 a, b, c, d and Table 1). The copy numbers of most non-clonal chromosomes including marker chromosomes differed from clonal averages ± 1 (see Fig. 12 a, b and specifically Fig. 12 c, d ). The chromosomes with non-clonal copy numbers represent the ongoing karyotypic variation predicted by the inherent variability of cancer-specific aneuploidy (See Fig. 11c and Background). We conclude that the metastasis M-425 is subspecies of the parental medulloblastoma M-458