Blood Ties: Chimerism Can Mask Twin Discordance in High-Throughput Sequencing

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Erlich

Twin studies have long provided a means to separate the contributions of genetic and environmental factors. A recent pioneering report by Baranzini et al. presented an analysis of the complete genomes and epigenomes of a monozygotic (MZ) twin pair discordant for multiple sclerosis. This failed to find any difference between the twins, raising doubts regarding the value of whole-genome twin studies for defining disease susceptibility alleles. However, the study was carried out with DNA extracted from blood. In many cases, the hematopoietic lineages of MZ twins are chimeric due to twin-to-twin exchange of hematopoietic stem cells during embryogenesis. We therefore wondered how chimerism might impact the ability to identify genetic differences. We inferred the blood chimerism rates and profiles of more than 30 discordant twin cases from a wide variety of medical conditions. We found that the genotype compositions of the twins were highly similar. We then benchmarked the performance of SNP callers to detect discordant variations using high-throughput sequencing data. Our analysis revealed that chimerism patterns, well within the range normally observed in MZ twins, greatly reduce the sensitivity of SNP calls. This raises questions regarding any conclusions of genomic homogeneity that might be drawn from studies of blood-derived twin DNA.

MycoKeys ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 29-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sten Anslan ◽  
R. Henrik Nilsson ◽  
Christian Wurzbacher ◽  
Petr Baldrian ◽  
Leho Tedersoo ◽  
...  

Along with recent developments in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and thus fast accumulation of HTS data, there has been a growing need and interest for developing tools for HTS data processing and communication. In particular, a number of bioinformatics tools have been designed for analysing metabarcoding data, each with specific features, assumptions and outputs. To evaluate the potential effect of the application of different bioinformatics workflow on the results, we compared the performance of different analysis platforms on two contrasting high-throughput sequencing data sets. Our analysis revealed that the computation time, quality of error filtering and hence output of specific bioinformatics process largely depends on the platform used. Our results show that none of the bioinformatics workflows appears to perfectly filter out the accumulated errors and generate Operational Taxonomic Units, although PipeCraft, LotuS and PIPITS perform better than QIIME2 and Galaxy for the tested fungal amplicon dataset. We conclude that the output of each platform requires manual validation of the OTUs by examining the taxonomy assignment values.


Genomics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 109 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Guo ◽  
Yulin Dai ◽  
Hui Yu ◽  
Shilin Zhao ◽  
David C. Samuels ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Anders ◽  
Paul Theodor Pyl ◽  
Wolfgang Huber

Motivation: A large choice of tools exists for many standard tasks in the analysis of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data. However, once a project deviates from standard work flows, custom scripts are needed. Results: We present HTSeq, a Python library to facilitate the rapid development of such scripts. HTSeq offers parsers for many common data formats in HTS projects, as well as classes to represent data such as genomic coordinates, sequences, sequencing reads, alignments, gene model information, variant calls, and provides data structures that allow for querying via genomic coordinates. We also present htseq-count, a tool developed with HTSeq that preprocesses RNA-Seq data for differential expression analysis by counting the overlap of reads with genes. Availability: HTSeq is released as open-source software under the GNU General Public Licence and available from http://www-huber.embl.de/HTSeq or from the Python Package Index, https://pypi.python.org/pypi/HTSeq


Author(s):  
Anthony Federico ◽  
Stefano Monti

Abstract Summary Geneset enrichment is a popular method for annotating high-throughput sequencing data. Existing tools fall short in providing the flexibility to tackle the varied challenges researchers face in such analyses, particularly when analyzing many signatures across multiple experiments. We present a comprehensive R package for geneset enrichment workflows that offers multiple enrichment, visualization, and sharing methods in addition to novel features such as hierarchical geneset analysis and built-in markdown reporting. hypeR is a one-stop solution to performing geneset enrichment for a wide audience and range of use cases. Availability and implementation The most recent version of the package is available at https://github.com/montilab/hypeR. Contact [email protected] or [email protected]


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