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Identification of allelic imbalance with a statistical model for subtle genomic mosaicism.

ABSTRACT: Genetic heterogeneity in a mixed sample of tumor and normal DNA can confound characterization of the tumor genome. Numerous computational methods have been proposed to detect aberrations in DNA samples from tumor and normal tissue mixtures. Most of these require tumor purities to be at least 10-15%. Here, we present a statistical model to capture information, contained in the individual's germline haplotypes, about expected patterns in the B allele frequencies from SNP microarrays while fully modeling their magnitude, the first such model for SNP microarray data. Our model consists of a pair of hidden Markov models--one for the germline and one for the tumor genome--which, conditional on the observed array data and patterns of population haplotype variation, have a dependence structure induced by the relative imbalance of an individual's inherited haplotypes. Together, these hidden Markov models offer a powerful approach for dealing with mixtures of DNA where the main component represents the germline, thus suggesting natural applications for the characterization of primary clones when stromal contamination is extremely high, and for identifying lesions in rare subclones of a tumor when tumor purity is sufficient to characterize the primary lesions. Our joint model for germline haplotypes and acquired DNA aberration is flexible, allowing a large number of chromosomal alterations, including balanced and imbalanced losses and gains, copy-neutral loss-of-heterozygosity (LOH) and tetraploidy. We found our model (which we term J-LOH) to be superior for localizing rare aberrations in a simulated 3% mixture sample. More generally, our model provides a framework for full integration of the germline and tumor genomes to deal more effectively with missing or uncertain features, and thus extract maximal information from difficult scenarios where existing methods fail.

SUBMITTER: Xia R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4148184 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Identification of allelic imbalance with a statistical model for subtle genomic mosaicism.

Xia Rui R Vattathil Selina S Scheet Paul P

PLoS computational biology 20140828 8

Genetic heterogeneity in a mixed sample of tumor and normal DNA can confound characterization of the tumor genome. Numerous computational methods have been proposed to detect aberrations in DNA samples from tumor and normal tissue mixtures. Most of these require tumor purities to be at least 10-15%. Here, we present a statistical model to capture information, contained in the individual's germline haplotypes, about expected patterns in the B allele frequencies from SNP microarrays while fully mo ...[more]

PMID: 25166618

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Project description:Variation in gene expression is an important contributor to phenotypic diversity within and between species. Although this variation often has a genetic component, identification of the genetic variants driving this relationship remains challenging. In particular, measurements of gene expression usually do not reveal whether the genetic basis for any observed variation lies in cis or in trans to the gene, a distinction that has direct relevance to the physical location of the underlying genetic variant, and which may also impact its evolutionary trajectory. Allelic imbalance measurements identify cis-acting genetic effects by assaying the relative contribution of the two alleles of a cis-regulatory region to gene expression within individuals. Identification of patterns that predict commonly imbalanced genes could therefore serve as a useful tool and also shed light on the evolution of cis-regulatory variation itself. Here, we show that sequence motifs, polymorphism levels, and divergence levels around a gene can be used to predict commonly imbalanced genes in a human data set. Reduction of this feature set to four factors revealed that only one factor significantly differentiated between commonly imbalanced and nonimbalanced genes. We demonstrate that these results are consistent between the original data set and a second published data set in humans obtained using different technical and statistical methods. Finally, we show that variation in the single allelic imbalance-associated factor is partially explained by the density of genes in the region of a target gene (allelic imbalance is less probable for genes in gene-dense regions), and, to a lesser extent, the evenness of expression of the gene across tissues and the magnitude of negative selection on putative regulatory regions of the gene. These results suggest that the genomic distribution of functional cis-regulatory variants in the human genome is nonrandom, perhaps due to local differences in evolutionary constraint.

Dataset Information

Identification of allelic imbalance with a statistical model for subtle genomic mosaicism.

Publications

Identification of allelic imbalance with a statistical model for subtle genomic mosaicism.

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