skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: NPSV: A simulation-driven approach to genotyping structural variants in whole-genome sequencing data
Abstract Background Structural variants (SVs) play a causal role in numerous diseases but are difficult to detect and accurately genotype (determine zygosity) in whole-genome next-generation sequencing data. SV genotypers that assume that the aligned sequencing data uniformly reflect the underlying SV or use existing SV call sets as training data can only partially account for variant and sample-specific biases. Results We introduce NPSV, a machine learning–based approach for genotyping previously discovered SVs that uses next-generation sequencing simulation to model the combined effects of the genomic region, sequencer, and alignment pipeline on the observed SV evidence. We evaluate NPSV alongside existing SV genotypers on multiple benchmark call sets. We show that NPSV consistently achieves or exceeds state-of-the-art genotyping accuracy across SV call sets, samples, and variant types. NPSV can specifically identify putative de novo SVs in a trio context and is robust to offset SV breakpoints. Conclusions Growing SV databases and the increasing availability of SV calls from long-read sequencing make stand-alone genotyping of previously identified SVs an increasingly important component of genome analyses. By treating potential biases as a “black box” that can be simulated, NPSV provides a framework for accurately genotyping a broad range of SVs in both targeted and genome-scale applications.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1827373
PAR ID:
10378173
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
GigaScience
Volume:
10
Issue:
7
ISSN:
2047-217X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract Advances in whole-genome sequencing (WGS) promise to enable the accurate and comprehensive structural variant (SV) discovery. Dissecting SVs from WGS data presents a substantial number of challenges and a plethora of SV detection methods have been developed. Currently, evidence that investigators can use to select appropriate SV detection tools is lacking. In this article, we have evaluated the performance of SV detection tools on mouse and human WGS data using a comprehensive polymerase chain reaction-confirmed gold standard set of SVs and the genome-in-a-bottle variant set, respectively. In contrast to the previous benchmarking studies, our gold standard dataset included a complete set of SVs allowing us to report both precision and sensitivity rates of the SV detection methods. Our study investigates the ability of the methods to detect deletions, thus providing an optimistic estimate of SV detection performance as the SV detection methods that fail to detect deletions are likely to miss more complex SVs. We found that SV detection tools varied widely in their performance, with several methods providing a good balance between sensitivity and precision. Additionally, we have determined the SV callers best suited for low- and ultralow-pass sequencing data as well as for different deletion length categories. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract Motivation We propose Meltos, a novel computational framework to address the challenging problem of building tumor phylogeny trees using somatic structural variants (SVs) among multiple samples. Meltos leverages the tumor phylogeny tree built on somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) to identify high confidence SVs and produce a comprehensive tumor lineage tree, using a novel optimization formulation. While we do not assume the evolutionary progression of SVs is necessarily the same as SNVs, we show that a tumor phylogeny tree using high-quality somatic SNVs can act as a guide for calling and assigning somatic SVs on a tree. Meltos utilizes multiple genomic read signals for potential SV breakpoints in whole genome sequencing data and proposes a probabilistic formulation for estimating variant allele fractions (VAFs) of SV events. Results In order to assess the ability of Meltos to correctly refine SNV trees with SV information, we tested Meltos on two simulated datasets with five genomes in both. We also assessed Meltos on two real cancer datasets. We tested Meltos on multiple samples from a liposarcoma tumor and on a multi-sample breast cancer data (Yates et al., 2015), where the authors provide validated structural variation events together with deep, targeted sequencing for a collection of somatic SNVs. We show Meltos has the ability to place high confidence validated SV calls on a refined tumor phylogeny tree. We also showed the flexibility of Meltos to either estimate VAFs directly from genomic data or to use copy number corrected estimates. Availability and implementation Meltos is available at https://github.com/ih-lab/Meltos. Contact imh2003@med.cornell.edu Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. 
    more » « less
  3. Fewer than half of individuals with a suspected Mendelian or monogenic condition receive a precise molecular diagnosis after comprehensive clinical genetic testing. Improvements in data quality and costs have heightened interest in using long-read sequencing (LRS) to streamline clinical genomic testing, but the absence of control data sets for variant filtering and prioritization has made tertiary analysis of LRS data challenging. To address this, the 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP) Oxford Nanopore Technologies Sequencing Consortium aims to generate LRS data from at least 800 of the 1KGP samples. Our goal is to use LRS to identify a broader spectrum of variation so we may improve our understanding of normal patterns of human variation. Here, we present data from analysis of the first 100 samples, representing all 5 superpopulations and 19 subpopulations. These samples, sequenced to an average depth of coverage of 37× and sequence read N50 of 54 kbp, have high concordance with previous studies for identifying single nucleotide and indel variants outside of homopolymer regions. Using multiple structural variant (SV) callers, we identify an average of 24,543 high-confidence SVs per genome, including shared and private SVs likely to disrupt gene function as well as pathogenic expansions within disease-associated repeats that were not detected using short reads. Evaluation of methylation signatures revealed expected patterns at known imprinted loci, samples with skewed X-inactivation patterns, and novel differentially methylated regions. All raw sequencing data, processed data, and summary statistics are publicly available, providing a valuable resource for the clinical genetics community to discover pathogenic SVs. 
    more » « less
  4. Alkan, Can (Ed.)
    Abstract MotivationDetection of structural variants (SVs) from the alignment of sample DNA reads to the reference genome is an important problem in understanding human diseases. Long reads that can span repeat regions, along with an accurate alignment of these long reads play an important role in identifying novel SVs. Long-read sequencers, such as nanopore sequencing, can address this problem by providing very long reads but with high error rates, making accurate alignment challenging. Many errors induced by nanopore sequencing have a bias because of the physics of the sequencing process and proper utilization of these error characteristics can play an important role in designing a robust aligner for SV detection problems. In this article, we design and evaluate HQAlign, an aligner for SV detection using nanopore sequenced reads. The key ideas of HQAlign include (i) using base-called nanopore reads along with the nanopore physics to improve alignments for SVs, (ii) incorporating SV-specific changes to the alignment pipeline, and (iii) adapting these into existing state-of-the-art long-read aligner pipeline, minimap2 (v2.24), for efficient alignments. ResultsWe show that HQAlign captures about 4%–6% complementary SVs across different datasets, which are missed by minimap2 alignments while having a standalone performance at par with minimap2 for real nanopore reads data. For the common SV calls between HQAlign and minimap2, HQAlign improves the start and the end breakpoint accuracy by about 10%–50% for SVs across different datasets. Moreover, HQAlign improves the alignment rate to 89.35% from minimap2 85.64% for nanopore reads alignment to recent telomere-to-telomere CHM13 assembly, and it improves to 86.65% from 83.48% for nanopore reads alignment to GRCh37 human genome. Availability and implementationhttps://github.com/joshidhaivat/HQAlign.git. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Next-generation sequencing has allowed genetic studies to collect genome sequencing data from a large number of individuals. However, raw sequencing data are not usually interpretable due to fragmentation of the genome and technical biases; therefore, analysis of these data requires many computational approaches. First, for each sequenced individual, sequencing data are aligned and further processed to account for technical biases. Then, variant calling is performed to obtain information on the positions of genetic variants and their corresponding genotypes. Quality control (QC) is applied to identify individuals and genetic variants with sequencing errors. These procedures are necessary to generate accurate variant calls from sequencing data, and many computational approaches have been developed for these tasks. This review will focus on current widely used approaches for variant calling and QC. 
    more » « less