Hi All,

Thanks for taking time to read my post today. I appreciate your time and help.

I've been thinking about whether phylogenetic tree can infer temporal order of the given sample (for example migration history of tissue sample or human).

I read several articles on relevant topic. For phylogenetic analysis on human population, it seems that we can use SNPs info, combined with archaeology, to build phylogram, which is basically a phylogenetic tree with temporal order. I also read several articles which tried to build phylogenetics tree by using cancer and/or metastasis samples. Only if they have longitudinal or primary/metastasis labeled sample, can they infer the migration history.

Last year I read this specific paper Inferring parsimonious migration histories for metastatic cancers, they know which site is primary, and then they got a crude migration history by label a phylognetics tree using maximizing parsimonious algorithm.

My question is, if I have several cancer samples and a phylogenetic tree, and I don't have any temporal information of them, is there any algorithms or tricks that I can use to rule our some temporal information among these sample?