  Genetic mutations are footprints of tumour growth. While mutation data in
bulk samples has been used to infer evolutionary parameters hard to measure in
vivo, the advent of single-cell data has led to strong interest in the
mutational burden distribution (MBD) among tumour cells. We introduce dynamical
matrices and recurrence relations to integrate this single-cell MBD with known
statistics, and derive new analytical expressions. Surprisingly, we find that
the shape of the MBD is driven by cell lineage-level stochasticity rather than
by the distribution of mutations in each cell division.
