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Extremely low-coverage sequencing and imputation increases power for genome-wide association studies.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have proven to be a powerful method to identify common genetic variants contributing to susceptibility to common diseases. Here, we show that extremely low-coverage sequencing (0.1-0.5×) captures almost as much of the common (>5%) and low-frequency (1-5%) variation across the genome as SNP arrays. As an empirical demonstration, we show that genome-wide SNP genotypes can be inferred at a mean r(2) of 0.71 using off-target data (0.24× average coverage) in a whole-exome study of 909 samples. Using both simulated and real exome-sequencing data sets, we show that association statistics obtained using extremely low-coverage sequencing data attain similar P values at known associated variants as data from genotyping arrays, without an excess of false positives. Within the context of reductions in sample preparation and sequencing costs, funds invested in extremely low-coverage sequencing can yield several times the effective sample size of GWAS based on SNP array data and a commensurate increase in statistical power.

SUBMITTER: Pasaniuc B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3400344 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Extremely low-coverage sequencing and imputation increases power for genome-wide association studies.

Pasaniuc Bogdan B Rohland Nadin N McLaren Paul J PJ Garimella Kiran K Zaitlen Noah N Li Heng H Gupta Namrata N Neale Benjamin M BM Daly Mark J MJ Sklar Pamela P Sullivan Patrick F PF Bergen Sarah S Moran Jennifer L JL Hultman Christina M CM Lichtenstein Paul P Magnusson Patrik P Purcell Shaun M SM Haas David W DW Liang Liming L Sunyaev Shamil S Patterson Nick N de Bakker Paul I W PI Reich David D Price Alkes L AL

Nature genetics 20120520 6

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have proven to be a powerful method to identify common genetic variants contributing to susceptibility to common diseases. Here, we show that extremely low-coverage sequencing (0.1-0.5×) captures almost as much of the common (>5%) and low-frequency (1-5%) variation across the genome as SNP arrays. As an empirical demonstration, we show that genome-wide SNP genotypes can be inferred at a mean r(2) of 0.71 using off-target data (0.24× average coverage) in a w ...[more]

PMID: 22610117

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Project description:Genome-wide association studies are revolutionizing the search for the genes underlying human complex diseases. The main decisions to be made at the design stage of these studies are the choice of the commercial genotyping chip to be used and the numbers of case and control samples to be genotyped. The most common method of comparing different chips is using a measure of coverage, but this fails to properly account for the effects of sample size, the genetic model of the disease, and linkage disequilibrium between SNPs. In this paper, we argue that the statistical power to detect a causative variant should be the major criterion in study design. Because of the complicated pattern of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the human genome, power cannot be calculated analytically and must instead be assessed by simulation. We describe in detail a method of simulating case-control samples at a set of linked SNPs that replicates the patterns of LD in human populations, and we used it to assess power for a comprehensive set of available genotyping chips. Our results allow us to compare the performance of the chips to detect variants with different effect sizes and allele frequencies, look at how power changes with sample size in different populations or when using multi-marker tags and genotype imputation approaches, and how performance compares to a hypothetical chip that contains every SNP in HapMap. A main conclusion of this study is that marked differences in genome coverage may not translate into appreciable differences in power and that, when taking budgetary considerations into account, the most powerful design may not always correspond to the chip with the highest coverage. We also show that genotype imputation can be used to boost the power of many chips up to the level obtained from a hypothetical "complete" chip containing all the SNPs in HapMap. Our results have been encapsulated into an R software package that allows users to design future association studies and our methods provide a framework with which new chip sets can be evaluated.

Project description:BackgroundAlthough high-throughput genotyping arrays have made whole-genome association studies (WGAS) feasible, only a small proportion of SNPs in the human genome are actually surveyed in such studies. In addition, various SNP arrays assay different sets of SNPs, which leads to challenges in comparing results and merging data for meta-analyses. Genome-wide imputation of untyped markers allows us to address these issues in a direct fashion.Methods384 Caucasian American liver donors were genotyped using Illumina 650Y (Ilmn650Y) arrays, from which we also derived genotypes from the Ilmn317K array. On these data, we compared two imputation methods: MACH and BEAGLE. We imputed 2.5 million HapMap Release22 SNPs, and conducted GWAS on approximately 40,000 liver mRNA expression traits (eQTL analysis). In addition, 200 Caucasian American and 200 African American subjects were genotyped using the Affymetrix 500 K array plus a custom 164 K fill-in chip. We then imputed the HapMap SNPs and quantified the accuracy by randomly masking observed SNPs.ResultsMACH and BEAGLE perform similarly with respect to imputation accuracy. The Ilmn650Y results in excellent imputation performance, and it outperforms Affx500K or Ilmn317K sets. For Caucasian Americans, 90% of the HapMap SNPs were imputed at 98% accuracy. As expected, imputation of poorly tagged SNPs (untyped SNPs in weak LD with typed markers) was not as successful. It was more challenging to impute genotypes in the African American population, given (1) shorter LD blocks and (2) admixture with Caucasian populations in this population. To address issue (2), we pooled HapMap CEU and YRI data as an imputation reference set, which greatly improved overall performance. The approximate 40,000 phenotypes scored in these populations provide a path to determine empirically how the power to detect associations is affected by the imputation procedures. That is, at a fixed false discovery rate, the number of cis-eQTL discoveries detected by various methods can be interpreted as their relative statistical power in the GWAS. In this study, we find that imputation offer modest additional power (by 4%) on top of either Ilmn317K or Ilmn650Y, much less than the power gain from Ilmn317K to Ilmn650Y (13%).ConclusionCurrent algorithms can accurately impute genotypes for untyped markers, which enables researchers to pool data between studies conducted using different SNP sets. While genotyping itself results in a small error rate (e.g. 0.5%), imputing genotypes is surprisingly accurate. We found that dense marker sets (e.g. Ilmn650Y) outperform sparser ones (e.g. Ilmn317K) in terms of imputation yield and accuracy. We also noticed it was harder to impute genotypes for African American samples, partially due to population admixture, although using a pooled reference boosts performance. Interestingly, GWAS carried out using imputed genotypes only slightly increased power on top of assayed SNPs. The reason is likely due to adding more markers via imputation only results in modest gain in genetic coverage, but worsens the multiple testing penalties. Furthermore, cis-eQTL mapping using dense SNP set derived from imputation achieves great resolution, and locate associate peak closer to causal variants than conventional approach.

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Extremely low-coverage sequencing and imputation increases power for genome-wide association studies.

Publications

Extremely low-coverage sequencing and imputation increases power for genome-wide association studies.

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