UNMASC: tumor-only variant calling with unmatched normal controls.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Little P
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8494212 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Somatic mosaicism refers to the existence of somatic mutations in a fraction of somatic cells in a single biological sample. Its importance has mainly been discussed in theory although experimental work has started to emerge linking somatic mosaicism to disease diagnosis. Through novel statistical modeling of paired-end DNA-sequencing data using blood-derived DNA from healthy donors as well as DNA from tumor samples, we present an ultra-fast computational pipeline, LocHap that searches for multiple single nucleotide variants (SNVs) that are scaffolded by the same reads. We refer to scaffolded SNVs as local haplotypes (LH). When an LH exhibits more than two genotypes, we call it a local haplotype variant (LHV). The presence of LHVs is considered evidence of somatic mosaicism because a genetically homogeneous cell population will not harbor LHVs. Applying LocHap to whole-genome and whole-exome sequence data in DNA from normal blood and tumor samples, we find wide-spread LHVs across the genome. Importantly, we find more LHVs in tumor samples than in normal samples, and more in older adults than in younger ones. We confirm the existence of LHVs and somatic mosaicism by validation studies in normal blood samples. LocHap is publicly available at http://www.compgenome.org/lochap.
| S-EPMC4756850 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Archival tumor samples represent a rich resource of annotated specimens for translational genomics research. However, standard variant calling approaches require a matched normal sample from the same individual, which is often not available in the retrospective setting, making it difficult to distinguish between true somatic variants and individual-specific germline variants. Archival sections often contain adjacent normal tissue, but this tissue can include infiltrating tumor cells. As existing comparative somatic variant callers are designed to exclude variants present in the normal sample, a novel approach is required to leverage adjacent normal tissue with infiltrating tumor cells for somatic variant calling. Here we present lumosVar 2.0, a software package designed to jointly analyze multiple samples from the same patient, built upon our previous single sample tumor only variant caller lumosVar 1.0. The approach assumes that the allelic fraction of somatic variants and germline variants follow different patterns as tumor content and copy number state change. lumosVar 2.0 estimates allele specific copy number and tumor sample fractions from the data, and uses a to model to determine expected allelic fractions for somatic and germline variants and to classify variants accordingly. To evaluate the utility of lumosVar 2.0 to jointly call somatic variants with tumor and adjacent normal samples, we used a glioblastoma dataset with matched high and low tumor content and germline whole exome sequencing data (for true somatic variants) available for each patient. Both sensitivity and positive predictive value were improved when analyzing the high tumor and low tumor samples jointly compared to analyzing the samples individually or in-silico pooling of the two samples. Finally, we applied this approach to a set of breast and prostate archival tumor samples for which tumor blocks containing adjacent normal tissue were available for sequencing. Joint analysis using lumosVar 2.0 detected several variants, including known cancer hotspot mutations that were not detected by standard somatic variant calling tools using the adjacent tissue as presumed normal reference. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of leveraging paired tissue samples to improve somatic variant calling when a constitutional sample is not available.
| S-EPMC6435595 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Intra-tumor heterogeneity renders the identification of somatic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) a challenging problem. In particular, low-frequency SNVs are hard to distinguish from sequencing artifacts. While the increasing availability of multi-sample tumor DNA sequencing data holds the potential for more accurate variant calling, there is a lack of high-sensitivity multi-sample SNV callers that utilize these data. Here we report Moss, a method to identify low-frequency SNVs that recur in multiple sequencing samples from the same tumor. Moss provides any existing single-sample SNV caller the ability to support multiple samples with little additional time overhead. We demonstrate that Moss improves recall while maintaining high precision in a simulated dataset. On multi-sample hepatocellular carcinoma, acute myeloid leukemia and colorectal cancer datasets, Moss identifies new low-frequency variants that meet manual review criteria and are consistent with the tumor's mutational signature profile. In addition, Moss detects the presence of variants in more samples of the same tumor than reported by the single-sample caller. Moss' improved sensitivity in SNV calling will enable more detailed downstream analyses in cancer genomics.
| S-EPMC8044184 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Next-generation sequencing of DNA provides an unprecedented opportunity to discover rare genetic variants associated with complex diseases and traits. However, the common practice of first calling underlying genotypes and then treating the called values as known is prone to false positive findings, especially when genotyping errors are systematically different between cases and controls. This happens whenever cases and controls are sequenced at different depths, on different platforms, or in different batches. In this article, we provide a likelihood-based approach to testing rare variant associations that directly models sequencing reads without calling genotypes. We consider the (weighted) burden test statistic, which is the (weighted) sum of the score statistic for assessing effects of individual variants on the trait of interest. Because variant locations are unknown, we develop a simple, computationally efficient screening algorithm to estimate the loci that are variants. Because our burden statistic may not have mean zero after screening, we develop a novel bootstrap procedure for assessing the significance of the burden statistic. We demonstrate through extensive simulation studies that the proposed tests are robust to a wide range of differential sequencing qualities between cases and controls, and are at least as powerful as the standard genotype calling approach when the latter controls type I error. An application to the UK10K data reveals novel rare variants in gene BTBD18 associated with childhood onset obesity. The relevant software is freely available.
| S-EPMC4859496 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Identifying differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between tumor and normal samples is critical for studying tumorigenesis, and has been routinely applied to identify diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic biomarkers for many cancers. It is well-known that solid tumor tissue samples obtained from clinical settings are always mixtures of cancer and normal cells. However, the tumor purity information is more or less ignored in traditional differential expression analyses, which might decrease the power of differential gene identification or even bias the results. In this paper, we have developed a novel differential gene calling method called DECtp by integrating tumor purity information into a generalized least square procedure, followed by the Wald test. We compared DECtp with popular methods like t-test and limma on nine simulation datasets with different sample sizes and noise levels. DECtp achieved the highest area under curves (AUCs) for all the comparisons, suggesting that cancer purity information is critical for DEG calling between tumor and normal samples. In addition, we applied DECtp into cancer and normal samples of 14 tumor types collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and compared the DEGs with those called by limma. As a result, DECtp achieved more sensitive, consistent, and biologically meaningful results and identified a few novel DEGs for further experimental validation.
| S-EPMC6121016 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The advent and ongoing development of next generation sequencing technologies (NGS) has led to a rapid increase in the rate of human genome re-sequencing data, paving the way for personalized genomics and precision medicine. The body of genome resequencing data is progressively increasing underlining the need for accurate and time-effective bioinformatics systems for genotyping - a crucial prerequisite for identification of candidate causal mutations in diagnostic screens.Here we present CoVaCS, a fully automated, highly accurate system with a web based graphical interface for genotyping and variant annotation. Extensive tests on a gold standard benchmark data-set -the NA12878 Illumina platinum genome- confirm that call-sets based on our consensus strategy are completely in line with those attained by similar command line based approaches, and far more accurate than call-sets from any individual tool. Importantly our system exhibits better sensitivity and higher specificity than equivalent commercial software.CoVaCS offers optimized pipelines integrating state of the art tools for variant calling and annotation for whole genome sequencing (WGS), whole-exome sequencing (WES) and target-gene sequencing (TGS) data. The system is currently hosted at Cineca, and offers the speed of a HPC computing facility, a crucial consideration when large numbers of samples must be analysed. Importantly, all the analyses are performed automatically allowing high reproducibility of the results. As such, we believe that CoVaCS can be a valuable tool for the analysis of human genome resequencing studies. CoVaCS is available at: https://bioinformatics.cineca.it/covacs .
| S-EPMC5800023 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We present elPrep 5, which updates the elPrep framework for processing sequencing alignment/map files with variant calling. elPrep 5 can now execute the full pipeline described by the GATK Best Practices for variant calling, which consists of PCR and optical duplicate marking, sorting by coordinate order, base quality score recalibration, and variant calling using the haplotype caller algorithm. elPrep 5 produces identical BAM and VCF output as GATK4 while significantly reducing the runtime by parallelizing and merging the execution of the pipeline steps. Our benchmarks show that elPrep 5 speeds up the runtime of the variant calling pipeline by a factor 8-16x on both whole-exome and whole-genome data while using the same hardware resources as GATK4. This makes elPrep 5 a suitable drop-in replacement for GATK4 when faster execution times are needed.
| S-EPMC7861424 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundIn standard high throughput sequencing analysis, genetic variants are not assigned to a homologous chromosome of origin. This process, called haplotype phasing, can reveal information important for understanding the relationship between genetic variants and biological phenotypes. For example, in genes that carry multiple heterozygous missense variants, phasing resolves whether one or both gene copies are altered. Here, we present a novel approach to phasing variants that takes advantage of unique properties of paired tumor:normal sequencing data from cancer studies.ResultsVAF phasing uses changes in variant allele frequency (VAF) between tumor and normal samples in regions of somatic chromosomal gain or loss to phase germline variants. We apply VAF phasing to 6180 samples from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and demonstrate that our method is highly concordant with other standard phasing methods, and can phase an average of 33% more variants than other read-backed phasing methods. Using variant annotation tools designed to score gene haplotypes, we find a suggestive association between carrying multiple missense variants in a single copy of a cancer predisposition gene and earlier age of cancer diagnosis.ConclusionsVAF phasing exploits unique properties of tumor genomes to increase the number of germline variants that can be phased over standard read-backed methods in paired tumor:normal samples. Our phase-informed association testing results call attention to the need to develop more tools for assessing the joint effect of multiple genetic variants.
| S-EPMC6537421 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Significant clinical and research applications are driving large scale adoption of individualized tumor sequencing in cancer in order to identify tumors-specific mutations. When a matched germline sample is available, somatic mutations may be identified using comparative callers. However, matched germline samples are frequently not available such as with archival tissues, which makes it difficult to distinguish somatic from germline variants. While population databases may be used to filter out known germline variants, recent studies have shown private germline variants result in an inflated false positive rate in unmatched tumor samples, and the number germline false positives in an individual may be related to ancestry. METHODS:First, we examined the relationship between the germline false positives and ancestry. Then we developed and implemented a tumor only caller (LumosVar) that leverages differences in allelic frequency between somatic and germline variants in impure tumors. We used simulated data to systematically examine how copy number alterations, tumor purity, and sequencing depth should affect the sensitivity of our caller. Finally, we evaluated the caller on real data. RESULTS:We find the germline false-positive rate is significantly higher for individuals of non-European Ancestry largely due to the limited diversity in public polymorphism databases and due to population-specific characteristics such as admixture or recent expansions. Our Bayesian tumor only caller (LumosVar) is able to greatly reduce false positives from private germline variants, and our sensitivity is similar to predictions based on simulated data. CONCLUSIONS:Taken together, our results suggest that studies of individuals of non-European ancestry would most benefit from our approach. However, high sensitivity requires sufficiently impure tumors and adequate sequencing depth. Even in impure tumors, there are copy number alterations that result in germline and somatic variants having similar allele frequencies, limiting the sensitivity of the approach. We believe our approach could greatly improve the analysis of archival samples in a research setting where the normal is not available.
| S-EPMC5649057 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Hybrid capture-based next-generation sequencing of DNA has been widely applied in the detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). Various methods have been proposed for ctDNA detection, but low-allelic-fraction (AF) variants are still a great challenge. In addition, no panel-wide calling algorithm is available, which hiders the full usage of ctDNA based 'liquid biopsy'. Thus, we developed the VBCALAVD (Virtual Barcode-based Calling Algorithm for Low Allelic Variant Detection) in silico to overcome these limitations. RESULTS:Based on the understanding of the nature of ctDNA fragmentation, a novel platform-independent virtual barcode strategy was established to eliminate random sequencing errors by clustering sequencing reads into virtual families. Stereotypical mutant-family-level background artifacts were polished by constructing AF distributions. Three additional robust fine-tuning filters were obtained to eliminate stochastic mutant-family-level noises. The performance of our algorithm was validated using cell-free DNA reference standard samples (cfDNA RSDs) and normal healthy cfDNA samples (cfDNA controls). For the RSDs with AFs of 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1 and 5%, the mean F1 scores were 0.43 (0.25~0.56), 0.77, 0.92, 0.926 (0.86~1.0) and 0.89 (0.75~1.0), respectively, which indicates that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the published algorithms. Among controls, no false positives were detected. Meanwhile, characteristics of mutant-family-level noise and quantitative determinants of divergence between mutant-family-level noises from controls and RSDs were clearly depicted. CONCLUSIONS:Due to its good performance in the detection of low-AF variants, our algorithm will greatly facilitate the noninvasive panel-wide detection of ctDNA in research and clinical settings. The whole pipeline is available at https://github.com/zhaodalv/VBCALAVD.
| S-EPMC7118954 | biostudies-literature