Comparative analysis of somatic variant calling on matched FF and FFPE WGS from a metastatic prostate sample
Abstract Background. Research grade Fresh Frozen (FF) DNA material is not yet routinely collected in clinical practice. Many hospitals, however, do collect and store Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) tumor samples. Consequently, the sample size of whole genome cancer cohort studies could be increased tremendously by including FFPE samples, although the presence of artifacts might obfuscate the variant calling. To assess whether FFPE material can be used for cohort studies, we performed an in-depth comparison of somatic SNVs called on matching FF and FFPE Whole Genome Sequence (WGS) samples extracted from the same prostate metastatic tumor. Results. We first compared the calls between FF and FFPE, showing that on average 50% of the calls in FF are recovered in FFPE, with notable differences between variant callers. Remarkably, this overlap was better than the overlap between different variant callers on the same sample. Inspecting the Variant Allele Frequency (VAF), we observed that many of the calls common to FF and FFPE belonged to the same clonal subpopulation but were detected at a lower VAF in FFPE. We also demonstrated that these calls receive higher significance scores and are often identified by more than one variant caller. Based on this observation, we propose a simple heuristic to perform reliable variant calling in FFPE samples. Our heuristic identified 3684 common calls at a F1-score of 0.83. Conclusion. This study illustrates that when using the correct variant calling strategy, the overlap between the FF and FFPE sample in somatic SNVs increases to such an extent that a large fraction of the calls detected in the FFPE sample are contained in the FF sample and the number of variants unique to each sample remains restricted. These results suggest that somatic variants derived from WGS of FFPE material can be used in cohort studies.