Reveel: large-scale population genotyping using low-coverage sequencing data
Lin Huang, Bo Wang, Ruitang Chen, Sivan Bercovici, Serafim Batzoglou
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/011882

Population low-coverage whole-genome sequencing is rapidly emerging as a prominent approach for discovering genomic variation and genotyping a cohort. This approach combines substantially lower cost than full-coverage sequencing with whole-genome discovery of low-allele-frequency variants, to an extent that is not possible with array genotyping or exome sequencing. However, a challenging computational problem arises when attempting to discover variants and genotype the entire cohort. Variant discovery and genotyping are relatively straightforward on a single individual that has been sequenced at high coverage, because the inference decomposes into the independent genotyping of each genomic position for which a sufficient number of confidently mapped reads are available. However, in cases where low-coverage population data are given, the joint inference requires leveraging the complex linkage disequilibrium patterns in the cohort to compensate for sparse and missing data in each individual. The potentially massive computation time for such inference, as well as the missing data that confound low-frequency allele discovery, need to be overcome for this approach to become practical. Here, we present Reveel, a novel method for single nucleotide variant calling and genotyping of large cohorts that have been sequenced at low coverage. Reveel introduces a novel technique for leveraging linkage disequilibrium that deviates from previous Markov-based models. We evaluate Reveel???s performance through extensive simulations as well as real data from the 1000 Genomes Project, and show that it achieves higher accuracy in low-frequency allele discovery and substantially lower computation cost than previous state-of-the-art methods.

Whole-genome sequencing is more powerful than whole-exome sequencing for detecting exome variants
Aziz Belkadi, Alexandre Bolze, Yuval Itan, Quentin B Vincent, Alexander Antipenko, Bertrand Boisson, Jean-Laurent Casanova, Laurent Abel
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010363
We compared whole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) for the detection of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in the exomes of six unrelated individuals. In the regions targeted by exome capture, the mean number of SNVs detected was 84,192 for WES and 84,968 for WGS. Only 96% of the variants were detected by both methods, with the same genotype identified for 99.2% of them. The distributions of coverage depth (CD), genotype quality (GQ), and minor read ratio (MRR) were much more homogeneous for WGS than for WES data. Most variants with discordant genotypes were filtered out when we used thresholds of CD≥8X, GQ≥20, and MRR≥0.2. However, a substantial number of coding variants were identified exclusively by WES (105 on average) or WGS (692). We Sanger sequenced a random selection of 170 of these exclusive variants, and estimated the mean number of false-positive coding variants per sample at 79 for WES and 36 for WGS. Importantly, the mean number of real coding variants identified by WGS and missed by WES (656) was much larger than the number of real coding variants identified by WES and missed by WGS (26). A substantial proportion of these exclusive variants (32%) were predicted to be damaging. In addition, about 380 genes were poorly covered (~27% of base pairs with CD<8X) by WES for all samples, including 49 genes underlying Mendelian disorders. We conclude that WGS is more powerful and reliable than WES for detecting potential disease-causing mutations in the exome.

Bayesian Structured Sparsity from Gaussian Fields
Barbara E. Engelhardt, Ryan P. Adams
(Submitted on 8 Jul 2014)

Substantial research on structured sparsity has contributed to analysis of many different applications. However, there have been few Bayesian procedures among this work. Here, we develop a Bayesian model for structured sparsity that uses a Gaussian process (GP) to share parameters of the sparsity-inducing prior in proportion to feature similarity as defined by an arbitrary positive definite kernel. For linear regression, this sparsity-inducing prior on regression coefficients is a relaxation of the canonical spike-and-slab prior that flattens the mixture model into a scale mixture of normals. This prior retains the explicit posterior probability on inclusion parameters—now with GP probit prior distributions—but enables tractable computation via elliptical slice sampling for the latent Gaussian field. We motivate development of this prior using the genomic application of association mapping, or identifying genetic variants associated with a continuous trait. Our Bayesian structured sparsity model produced sparse results with substantially improved sensitivity and precision relative to comparable methods. Through simulations, we show that three properties are key to this improvement: i) modeling structure in the covariates, ii) significance testing using the posterior probabilities of inclusion, and iii) model averaging. We present results from applying this model to a large genomic dataset to demonstrate computational tractability.

Bayesian Model Comparison in Genetic Association Analysis: Linear Mixed Modeling and SNP Set Testing

Xiaoquan Wen
(Submitted on 29 Apr 2014)

We consider the problems of hypothesis testing and model comparison under a flexible Bayesian linear regression model whose formulation is closely connected with the linear mixed effect model and the parametric models for SNP set analysis in genetic association studies. We derive a class of analytic approximate Bayes factors and illustrate their connections with a variety of frequentist test statistics, including the Wald statistic and the variance component score statistic. Taking advantage of Bayesian model averaging and hierarchical modeling, we demonstrate some distinct advantages and flexibilities in the approaches utilizing the derived Bayes factors in the context of genetic association studies. We demonstrate our proposed methods using real or simulated numerical examples in applications of single SNP association testing, multi-locus fine-mapping and SNP set association testin

Principal component gene set enrichment (PCGSE)
H. Robert Frost, Zhigang Li, Jason H. Moore

Motivation: Although principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used for the dimensional reduction of biomedical data, interpretation of PCA results remains daunting. Most existing methods attempt to explain each principal component (PC) in terms of a small number of variables by generating approximate PCs with few non-zero loadings. Although useful when just a few variables dominate the population PCs, these methods are often inadequate for characterizing the PCs of high-dimensional genomic data. For genomic data, reproducible and biologically meaningful PC interpretation requires methods based on the combined signal of functionally related sets of genes. While gene set testing methods have been widely used in supervised settings to quantify the association of groups of genes with clinical outcomes, these methods have seen only limited application for testing the enrichment of gene sets relative to sample PCs. Results: We describe a novel approach, principal component gene set enrichment (PCGSE), for computing the statistical association between gene sets and the PCs of genomic data. The PCGSE method performs a two-stage competitive gene set test using the correlation between each gene and each PC as the gene-level test statistic with flexible choice of both the gene set test statistic and the method used to compute the null distribution of the gene set statistic. Using simulated data with simulated gene sets and real gene expression data with curated gene sets, we demonstrate that biologically meaningful and computationally efficient results can be obtained from a simple parametric version of the PCGSE method that performs a correlation-adjusted two-sample t-test between the gene-level test statistics for gene set members and genes not in the set. Availability: this http URL Contact: rob.frost@dartmouth.edu or jason.h.moore@dartmouth.edu