Time-series Variant Calling — Longitudinal Somatic Mutation Detection

Time-series variant calling is a bioinformatics pipeline that identifies and tracks genomic variants — typically somatic mutations — across multiple sequencing samples collected from the same subject at different time points. It is most widely applied in cancer genomics to reconstruct tumour evolution, monitor minimal residual disease, and detect the emergence of therapy-resistant clones. By jointly modelling variant allele frequencies across the temporal dimension, the method distinguishes true somatic changes from sequencing noise and estimates clonal dynamics over time.