Wikipedia
Chromoplexy refers to a class of complex DNA rearrangement observed in the genomes of cancer cells. This phenomenon was first identified in prostate cancer by whole genome sequencing of prostate tumors. Chromoplexy causes genetic material from one or more chromosomes to become scrambled as multiple strands of DNA are broken and ligated to each other in a new configuration. In prostate cancer, chromoplexy may cause multiple oncogenic events within a single cell cycle, providing a proliferative advantage to a (pre-)cancerous cell. Several oncogenic mutations in prostate cancer occur through chromoplexy, such as disruption of the tumor suppressor gene PTEN or creation of the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion gene.
Chromplexy was originally inferred by statistically analyzing the location of DNA breaks across the genome. Its prevalence across cancers is not known, because only a few types of tumors have been analyzed for chromoplexy in the published literature. However, it was detected in the majority of 57 prostate tumors analyze and has been reported in non-small cell lung cancers, melanoma and head and neck squamous cell cancers
Along with chromothripsis, and break-fusion-bridge cycles, chromoplexy is an example of chromoanagenesis., a catch-all term for events that generate complex structural chromosomal abnormalities