scholarly journals A Comparison of Tools for Copy-Number Variation Detection in Germline Whole Exome and Whole Genome Sequencing Data

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 6283
Author(s):  
Migle Gabrielaite ◽  
Mathias Husted Torp ◽  
Malthe Sebro Rasmussen ◽  
Sergio Andreu-Sánchez ◽  
Filipe Garrett Vieira ◽  
...  

Copy-number variations (CNVs) have important clinical implications for several diseases and cancers. Relevant CNVs are hard to detect because common structural variations define large parts of the human genome. CNV calling from short-read sequencing would allow single protocol full genomic profiling. We reviewed 50 popular CNV calling tools and included 11 tools for benchmarking in a reference cohort encompassing 39 whole genome sequencing (WGS) samples paired current clinical standard—SNP-array based CNV calling. Additionally, for nine samples we also performed whole exome sequencing (WES), to address the effect of sequencing protocol on CNV calling. Furthermore, we included Gold Standard reference sample NA12878, and tested 12 samples with CNVs confirmed by multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA). Tool performance varied greatly in the number of called CNVs and bias for CNV lengths. Some tools had near-perfect recall of CNVs from arrays for some samples, but poor precision. Several tools had better performance for NA12878, which could be a result of overfitting. We suggest combining the best tools also based on different methodologies: GATK gCNV, Lumpy, DELLY, and cn.MOPS. Reducing the total number of called variants could potentially be assisted by the use of background panels for filtering of frequently called variants.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Migle Gabrielaite ◽  
Mathias Husted Torp ◽  
Sergio Andreu-Sánchez ◽  
Filipe Garrett Vieira ◽  
Christina Bligaard Pedersen ◽  
...  

Background: Copy-number variations (CNVs) have important clinical implications for several diseases and cancers. The clinically relevant CNVs are hard to detect because CNVs are common structural variations that define large parts of the normal human genome. CNV calling from short-read sequencing data has the potential to leverage available cohort studies and allow full genomic profiling in the clinic without the need for additional data modalities. Questions regarding performance of CNV calling tools for clinical use and suitable sequencing protocols remain poorly addressed, mainly because of the lack of good reference data sets. Methods: We reviewed 50 popular CNV calling tools and included 11 tools for benchmarking in a unique reference cohort encompassing 39 whole genome sequencing (WGS) samples paired with analysis by the current clinical standard—SNP-array based CNV calling. Additionally, for nine of these samples we performed whole exome sequencing (WES) performed, in order to address the effect of sequencing protocol on CNV calling. Furthermore, we included Gold Standard reference sample NA12878, and tested 12 samples with CNVs confirmed by multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA). Results: Tool performance varied greatly in the number of called CNVs and bias for CNV lengths. Some tools had near-perfect recall of CNVs from arrays for some samples, but poor precision. Filtering output by CNV ranks from tools did not salvage precision. Several tools had better performance patterns for NA12878, and we hypothesize that this is the result of overfitting during the tool development. Conclusions: We suggest combining tools with the best recall: GATK gCNV, Lumpy, DELLY, and cn.MOPS. These tools also capture different CNVs. Further improvements in precision requires additional development of tools, reference data sets, and annotation of CNVs, potentially assisted by the use of background panels for filtering of frequently called variants.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Smolander ◽  
Sofia Khan ◽  
Kalaimathy Singaravelu ◽  
Leni Kauko ◽  
Riikka J. Lund ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Detection of copy number variations (CNVs) from high-throughput next-generation whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data has become a widely used research method during the recent years. However, only a little is known about the applicability of the developed algorithms to ultra-low-coverage (0.0005–0.8×) data that is used in various research and clinical applications, such as digital karyotyping and single-cell CNV detection. Result Here, the performance of six popular read-depth based CNV detection algorithms (BIC-seq2, Canvas, CNVnator, FREEC, HMMcopy, and QDNAseq) was studied using ultra-low-coverage WGS data. Real-world array- and karyotyping kit-based validation were used as a benchmark in the evaluation. Additionally, ultra-low-coverage WGS data was simulated to investigate the ability of the algorithms to identify CNVs in the sex chromosomes and the theoretical minimum coverage at which these tools can accurately function. Our results suggest that while all the methods were able to detect large CNVs, many methods were susceptible to producing false positives when smaller CNVs (< 2 Mbp) were detected. There was also significant variability in their ability to identify CNVs in the sex chromosomes. Overall, BIC-seq2 was found to be the best method in terms of statistical performance. However, its significant drawback was by far the slowest runtime among the methods (> 3 h) compared with FREEC (~ 3 min), which we considered the second-best method. Conclusions Our comparative analysis demonstrates that CNV detection from ultra-low-coverage WGS data can be a highly accurate method for the detection of large copy number variations when their length is in millions of base pairs. These findings facilitate applications that utilize ultra-low-coverage CNV detection.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milovan Suvakov ◽  
Arijit Panda ◽  
Colin Diesh ◽  
Ian Holmes ◽  
Alexej Abyzov

AbstractDetecting copy number variations (CNVs) and copy number alterations (CNAs) based on whole genome sequencing data is important for personalized genomics and treatment. CNVnator is one of the most popular tools for CNV/CNA discovery and analysis based on read depth (RD). Herein, we present an extension of CNVnator developed in Python -- CNVpytor. CNVpytor inherits the reimplemented core engine of its predecessor and extends visualization, modularization, performance, and functionality. Additionally, CNVpytor uses B-allele frequency (BAF) likelihood information from single nucleotide polymorphism and small indels data as additional evidence for CNVs/CNAs and as primary information for copy number neutral losses of heterozygosity. CNVpytor is significantly faster than CNVnator—particularly for parsing alignment files (2 to 20 times faster)—and has (20-50 times) smaller intermediate files. CNV calls can be filtered using several criteria and annotated. Modular architecture allows it to be used in shared and cloud environments such as Google Colab and Jupyter notebook. Data can be exported into JBrowse, while a lightweight plugin version of CNVpytor for JBrowse enables nearly instant and GUI-assisted analysis of CNVs by any user. CNVpytor release and the source code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/abyzovlab/CNVpytor under the MIT license.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Supernat ◽  
Oskar Valdimar Vidarsson ◽  
Vidar M. Steen ◽  
Tomasz Stokowy

ABSTRACTTesting of patients with genetics-related disorders is in progress of shifting from single gene assays to gene panel sequencing, whole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS). Since WGS is unquestionably becoming a new foundation for molecular analyses, we decided to compare three currently used tools for variant calling of human whole genome sequencing data. We tested DeepVariant, a new TensorFlow machine learning-based variant caller, and compared this tool to GATK 4.0 and SpeedSeq, using 30×, 15× and 10× WGS data of the well-known NA12878 DNA reference sample.According to our comparison, the performance on SNV calling was almost similar in 30× data, with all three variant callers reaching F-Scores (i.e. harmonic mean of recall and precision) equal to 0.98. In contrast, DeepVariant was more precise in indel calling than GATK and SpeedSeq, as demonstrated by F-Scores of 0.94, 0.90 and 0.84, respectively.We conclude that the DeepVariant tool has great potential and usefulness for analysis of WGS data in medical genetics.


GigaScience ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milovan Suvakov ◽  
Arijit Panda ◽  
Colin Diesh ◽  
Ian Holmes ◽  
Alexej Abyzov

Abstract Background Detecting copy number variations (CNVs) and copy number alterations (CNAs) based on whole-genome sequencing data is important for personalized genomics and treatment. CNVnator is one of the most popular tools for CNV/CNA discovery and analysis based on read depth. Findings Herein, we present an extension of CNVnator developed in Python—CNVpytor. CNVpytor inherits the reimplemented core engine of its predecessor and extends visualization, modularization, performance, and functionality. Additionally, CNVpytor uses B-allele frequency likelihood information from single-nucleotide polymorphisms and small indels data as additional evidence for CNVs/CNAs and as primary information for copy number–neutral losses of heterozygosity. Conclusions CNVpytor is significantly faster than CNVnator—particularly for parsing alignment files (2–20 times faster)—and has (20–50 times) smaller intermediate files. CNV calls can be filtered using several criteria, annotated, and merged over multiple samples. Modular architecture allows it to be used in shared and cloud environments such as Google Colab and Jupyter notebook. Data can be exported into JBrowse, while a lightweight plugin version of CNVpytor for JBrowse enables nearly instant and GUI-assisted analysis of CNVs by any user. CNVpytor release and the source code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/abyzovlab/CNVpytor under the MIT license.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Y Yang ◽  
Charles E Newcomb ◽  
Stephanie L Battle ◽  
Anthony YY Hsieh ◽  
Hailey L Chapman ◽  
...  

Mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNA-CN) is a proxy for mitochondrial function and has been of increasing interest to the mitochondrial research community. There are several ways to measure mtDNA-CN, ranging from whole genome sequencing to qPCR. A recent article from the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics described a novel method for measuring mtDNA-CN that is both inexpensive and reproducible. However, we show that certain individuals, particularly those with very low qPCR mtDNA measurements, show poor concordance between qPCR and whole genome sequencing measurements. After examining whole genome sequencing data, this seems to be due to polymorphisms within the D-loop primer region. Non-concordant mtDNA-CN was observed in all instances of polymorphisms at certain positions in the D-loop primer regions, however, not all positions are susceptible to this effect. In particular, these polymorphisms appear disproportionately in individuals with the L, T, and U mitochondrial haplogroups, indicating non-random dropout.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13s3 ◽  
pp. CIN.S14023
Author(s):  
Hatice Gulcin Ozer ◽  
Aisulu Usubalieva ◽  
Adrienne Dorrance ◽  
Ayse Selen Yilmaz ◽  
Michael Caligiuri ◽  
...  

The genome-wide discoveries such as detection of copy number alterations (CNA) from high-throughput whole-genome sequencing data enabled new developments in personalized medicine. The CNAs have been reported to be associated with various diseases and cancers including acute myeloid leukemia. However, there are multiple challenges to the use of current CNA detection tools that lead to high false-positive rates and thus impede widespread use of such tools in cancer research. In this paper, we discuss these issues and propose possible solutions. First, since the entire genome cannot be mapped due to some regions lacking sequence uniqueness, current methods cannot be appropriately adjusted to handle these regions in the analyses. Thus, detection of medium-sized CNAs is also being directly affected by these mappability problems. The requirement for matching control samples is also an important limitation because acquiring matching controls might not be possible or might not be cost efficient. Here we present an approach that addresses these issues and detects medium-sized CNAs in cancer genomes by (1) masking unmappable regions during the initial CNA detection phase, (2) using pool of a few normal samples as control, and (3) employing median filtering to adjust CNA ratios to its surrounding coverage and eliminate false positives.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Xing ◽  
Alan R. Dabney ◽  
Xiao Li ◽  
Guosong Wang ◽  
Clare A. Gill ◽  
...  

AbstractCopy number variants are insertions and deletions of 1 kb or larger in a genome that play an important role in phenotypic changes and human disease. Many software applications have been developed to detect copy number variants using either whole-genome sequencing or whole-exome sequencing data. However, there is poor agreement in the results from these applications. Simulated datasets containing copy number variants allow comprehensive comparisons of the operating characteristics of existing and novel copy number variant detection methods. Several software applications have been developed to simulate copy number variants and other structural variants in whole-genome sequencing data. However, none of the applications reliably simulate copy number variants in whole-exome sequencing data. We have developed and tested SECNVs (Simulator of Exome Copy Number Variants), a fast, robust and customizable software application for simulating copy number variants and whole-exome sequences from a reference genome. SECNVs is easy to install, implements a wide range of commands to customize simulations, can output multiple samples at once, and incorporates a pipeline to output rearranged genomes, short reads and BAM files in a single command. Variants generated by SECNVs are detected with high sensitivity and precision by tools commonly used to detect copy number variants. SECNVs is publicly available at https://github.com/YJulyXing/SECNVs.


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