Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets

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Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets
Christopher C. Chang, Carson C. Chow, Laurent C.A.M. Tellier, Shashaank Vattikuti, Shaun M. Purcell, James J. Lee
Comments: 2 figures, 1 additional file
Subjects: Genomics (q-bio.GN); Computation (stat.CO)

PLINK 1 is a widely used open-source C/C++ toolset for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and research in population genetics. However, the steady accumulation of data from imputation and whole-genome sequencing studies has exposed a strong need for even faster and more scalable implementations of key functions. In addition, GWAS and population-genetic data now frequently contain probabilistic calls, phase information, and/or multiallelic variants, none of which can be represented by PLINK 1’s primary data format.
To address these issues, we are developing a second-generation codebase for PLINK. The first major release from this codebase, PLINK 1.9, introduces extensive use of bit-level parallelism, O(sqrt(n))-time/constant-space Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and Fisher’s exact tests, and many other algorithmic improvements. In combination, these changes accelerate most operations by 1-4 orders of magnitude, and allow the program to handle datasets too large to fit in RAM. This will be followed by PLINK 2.0, which will introduce (a) a new data format capable of efficiently representing probabilities, phase, and multiallelic variants, and (b) extensions of many functions to account for the new types of information.
The second-generation versions of PLINK will offer dramatic improvements in performance and compatibility. For the first time, users without access to high-end computing resources can perform several essential analyses of the feature-rich and very large genetic datasets coming into use.

An extended reply to Mendez et al.: The ‘extremely ancient’ chromosome that still isn’t

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An extended reply to Mendez et al.: The ‘extremely ancient’ chromosome that still isn’t

Eran Elhaik, Tatiana V. Tatarinova, Anatole A. Klyosov, Dan Graur
(Submitted on 15 Oct 2014)

Earlier this year, we published a scathing critique of a paper by Mendez et al. (2013) in which the claim was made that a Y chromosome was 237,000-581,000 years old. Elhaik et al. (2014) also attacked a popular article in Scientific American by the senior author of Mendez et al. (2013), whose title was “Sex with other human species might have been the secret of Homo sapiens’s [sic] success” (Hammer 2013). Five of the 11 authors of Mendez et al. (2013) have now written a “rebuttal,” and we were allowed to reply.
Unfortunately, our reply was censored for being “too sarcastic and inflamed.” References were removed, meanings were castrated, and a dedication in the Acknowledgments was deleted. Now, that the so-called rebuttal by 45% of the authors of Mendez et al. (2013) has been published together with our vasectomized reply, we decided to make public our entire reply to the so called “rebuttal.” In fact, we go one step further, and publish a version of the reply that has not even been self-censored.
Now, that the so-called rebuttal by 45% of the authors of Mendez et al. (2013) has been published together with our vasectomized reply, we decided to make public our entire reply to the so called “rebuttal.” In fact, we go one step further, and publish a version of the reply that has not even been self-censored.

Whole-genome sequencing is more powerful than whole-exome sequencing for detecting exome variants

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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.

Similar efficacies of selection shape mitochondrial and nuclear genes in Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens

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Similar efficacies of selection shape mitochondrial and nuclear genes in Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens
Brandon S. Cooper, Chad Burrus, Chao Ji, Matthew W. Hahn, Kristi L. Montooth
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010355

Deleterious mutations contribute to polymorphism even when selection effectively prevents their fixation. The efficacy of selection in removing deleterious mitochondrial mutations from populations depends on the effective population size (Ne) of the mtDNA, and the degree to which a lack of recombination magnifies the effects of linked selection. Using complete mitochondrial genomes from Drosophila melanogaster and nuclear data available from the same samples, we re-examine the hypothesis that non-recombining animal mtDNA harbor an excess of deleterious polymorphisms relative to the nuclear genome. We find no evidence of recombination in the mitochondrial genome, and the much-reduced level of mitochondrial synonymous polymorphism relative to nuclear genes is consistent with a reduction in Ne. Nevertheless, we find that the neutrality index (NI), a measure of the excess on nonsynonymous polymorphism relative to the neutral expectation, is not significantly different between mitochondrial and nuclear loci. Reanalysis of published data from Homo sapiens reveals the same lack of a difference between the two genomes, though small samples in previous studies had suggested a strong difference in both species. Thus, despite a smaller Ne, mitochondrial loci of both flies and humans appear to experience similar efficacies of selection as do loci in the recombining nuclear genome.

Recent evolution of the mutation rate and spectrum in Europeans

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Recent evolution of the mutation rate and spectrum in Europeans
Kelley Harris
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010314

As humans dispersed out of Africa, they adapted to new environmental challenges including changes in exposure to mutagenic solar radiation. This raises the possibility that different populations experienced different selective pressures affecting genome integrity. Prior work has uncovered divergent selection in tropical versus temperate latitudes on eQTLs that regulate the DNA damage response, as well as evidence that the human mutation rate per year has changed at least 2-fold since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Here, I present evidence that the rate of a particular mutation type has recently increased in the European lineage, rising in frequency by 50% during the 30,000–50,000 years since Europeans diverged from Asians. A comparison of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) private to Africa, Asia, and Europe in the 1000 Genomes data reveals that private European variation is enriched for the transition 5’-TCC-3’→5’-TTC-3’. Although it is not clear whether UV played a causal role in the changing the European mutational spectrum, 5’-TCC-3’→5’-TTC-3’ is known to be the most common somatic mutation present in melanoma skin cancers, as well as the mutation most frequently induced in vitro by UV. Regardless of its causality, this change indicates that DNA replication fidelity has not remained stable even since the origin of modern humans and might have changed numerous times during our recent evolutionary history.

Massive bursts of transposable element activity in Drosophila

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Massive bursts of transposable element activity in Drosophila

Robert Kofler, Viola Nolte, Christian Schlötterer
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010231

The evolutionary dynamics of transposable element (TE) insertions have been of continued interest since TE activity has important implications for genome evolution and adaptation. Here, we infer the transposition dynamics of TEs by comparing their abundance in natural D. melanogaster and D. simulans populations. Sequencing pools of more than 550 South African flies to at least 320-fold coverage, we determined the genome wide TE insertion frequencies in both species. We show that 46 (49%) TE families in D. melanogaster and 44 (47%) in D. simulans experienced a recent burst of activity. The bursts of activity affected different TE families in the two species. While in D. melanogaster retrotransposons predominated, DNA transposons showed higher activity levels in D. simulans. We propose that the observed TE dynamics are the outcome of the demographic history of the two species, with habitat expansion triggering a period of rapid evolution.

Association Mapping across Numerous Traits Reveals Patterns of Functional Variation in Maize

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Association Mapping across Numerous Traits Reveals Patterns of Functional Variation in Maize

Jason G Wallace, Peter Bradbury, Nengyi Zhang, Yves Gibon, Mark Stitt, Edward Buckler
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010207
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ABSTRACT

Phenotypic variation in natural populations results from a combination of genetic effects, environmental effects, and gene-by-environment interactions. Despite the vast amount of genomic data becoming available, many pressing questions remain about the nature of genetic mutations that underlie functional variation. We present the results of combining genome-wide association analysis of 41 different phenotypes in ~5,000 inbred maize lines to analyze patterns of high-resolution genetic association among of 28.9 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and ~800,000 copy-number variants (CNVs). We show that genic and intergenic regions have opposite patterns of enrichment, minor allele frequencies, and effect sizes, implying tradeoffs among the probability that a given polymorphism will have an effect, the detectable size of that effect, and its frequency in the population. We also find that genes tagged by GWAS are enriched for regulatory functions and are ~50% more likely to have a paralog than expected by chance, indicating that gene regulation and neofunctionalization are strong drivers of phenotypic variation. These results will likely apply to many other organisms, especially ones with large and complex genomes like maize.

On the role of epistasis in adaptation

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On the role of epistasis in adaptation
David M. McCandlish, Jakub Otwinowski, Joshua B. Plotkin
Subjects: Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)

Although the role of epistasis in evolution has received considerable attention from experimentalists and theorists alike, it is unknown which aspects of adaptation are in fact sensitive to epistasis. Here, we address this question by comparing the evolutionary dynamics on all finite epistatic landscapes versus all finite non-epistatic landscapes, under weak mutation. We first analyze the fitness trajectory — that is, the time course of the expected fitness of a population. We show that for any epistatic fitness landscape and choice of starting genotype, there always exists a non-epistatic fitness landscape and starting genotype that produces the exact same fitness trajectory. Thus, surprisingly, the presence or absence of epistasis is irrelevant to the first-order dynamics of adaptation. On the other hand, we show that the time evolution of the variance in fitness across replicate populations can be sensitive to epistasis: some epistatic fitness landscapes produce variance trajectories that cannot be produced by any non-epistatic landscape. Likewise, the mean substitution trajectory — that is, the expected number of mutations that fix over time — is also sensitive to epistasis. These results on identifiability have direct implications for efforts to infer epistasis from the types of data often measured in experimental populations.

Quantification of GC-biased gene conversion in the human genome

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Quantification of GC-biased gene conversion in the human genome
Sylvain Glemin, Peter F Arndt, Philipp W Messer, Dmitri Petrov, Nicolas Galtier, Laurent Duret
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010173

Many lines of evidence indicate GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) has a major impact on the evolution of mammalian genomes. However, up to now, this process had not been properly quantified. In principle, the strength of gBGC can be measured from the analysis of derived allele frequency spectra. However, this approach is sensitive to a number of confounding factors. In particular, we show by simulations that the inference is pervasively affected by polymorphism polarization errors, especially at hypermutable sites, and spatial heterogeneity in gBGC strength. Here we propose a new method to quantify gBGC from DAF spectra, incorporating polarization errors and taking spatial heterogeneity into account. This method is very general in that it does not require any prior knowledge about the source of polarization errors and also provides information about mutation patterns. We apply this approach to human polymorphism data from the 1000 genomes project. We show that the strength of gBGC does not differ between hypermutable CpG sites and non-CpG sites, suggesting that in humans gBGC is not caused by the base-excision repair machinery. We further find that the impact of gBGC is concentrated primarily within recombination hotspots: genome-wide, the strength of gBGC is in the nearly neutral area, but 2% of the human genome is subject to strong gBGC, with population-scaled gBGC coefficients above 5. Given that the location of recombination hotspots evolves very rapidly, our analysis predicts that in the long term, a large fraction of the genome is affected by short episodes of strong gBGC.

STACEY: species delimitation and phylogeny estimation under the multispecies coalescent

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STACEY: species delimitation and phylogeny estimation under the multispecies coalescent
Graham R Jones
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/010199

This article describes a new package called STACEY for BEAST2 which is capable of both species delimitation and species tree estimation using DNA sequences from multiple loci. The focus in this article is on species delimitation. STACEY is based on the multispecies coalescent model, and builds on earlier software (DISSECT), which uses a `birth-death-collapse’ prior to deal with delimitations without the need for reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo moves. Like DISSECT, it requires no a priori assignment of individuals to species or populations, and no guide tree. This paper introduces two innovations. The first is a new model for the populations along the branches of the species tree, and the second is a new MCMC move for exploring the posterior when the multispecies coalescent model is assumed. The main benefit of STACEY over DISSECT is much better convergence. Current practice, using a pipeline approach to species delimitation under the multispecies coalescent, has been shown to have major problems on simulated data. The same simulated data set is used to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of STACEY.