A guide to understanding tumour evolution through the lens of population genetics

A new Review in Nature Reviews Cancer synthesises how population-genetics models of mutation, selection, and genetic drift can be applied to cancer sequencing data to quantitatively reconstruct tumour evolutionary dynamics. The framework enables researchers to distinguish genuine selective forces from neutral drift and non-genetic processes shaping tumour heterogeneity. By moving beyond pattern-based statistical genomics, the approach supports extraction of full evolutionary trajectories from standard tumour genome datasets. The work provides a conceptual roadmap for integrating evolutionary theory into clinical cancer genomics.