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Personalized copy number and segmental duplication maps using next-generation sequencing

Nature Genetics volume 41, pages 1061–1067 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Despite their importance in gene innovation and phenotypic variation, duplicated regions have remained largely intractable owing to difficulties in accurately resolving their structure, copy number and sequence content. We present an algorithm (mrFAST) to comprehensively map next-generation sequence reads, which allows for the prediction of absolute copy-number variation of duplicated segments and genes. We examine three human genomes and experimentally validate genome-wide copy number differences. We estimate that, on average, 73–87 genes vary in copy number between any two individuals and find that these genic differences overwhelmingly correspond to segmental duplications (odds ratio = 135; P < 2.2 × 10−16). Our method can distinguish between different copies of highly identical genes, providing a more accurate assessment of gene content and insight into functional constraint without the limitations of array-based technology.

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Figure 1: Correlation of predicted and known segmental duplications in NA18507.
Figure 2: Computational prediction and array CGH validation of segmental duplication copy number differences for three human genomes.
Figure 3: Validation of individual specific segmental duplications.
Figure 4: Correlation between computational and experimental copy number for NA18507 and JDW.
Figure 5: FISH validation.
Figure 6: Copy number differences between unique and duplicated regions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Bentley for early access to the Illumina WGS dataset for NA18507; J. Wang for the YH DNA and the cell line; M. Egholm and B. Simen for the JDW DNA and J.D. Watson for permission to analyze his genome. We also thank M. Shumway, P. Flicek and R. Leinonen for technical assistance in transferring large sequence datasets; E. Tüzün for help in parallelizing mrFAST for computation clusters through message passing interface; S. Girirajan for assistance with experiments and T. Brown for her help in manuscript preparation. J.M.K. is supported by a US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. T.M.-B. is supported by a Marie Curie fellowship (FP7). This work was supported, in part, by U.S. National Institutes of Health grant HG004120 to E.E.E. E.E.E. is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Can Alkan, Jeffrey M Kidd, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Gozde Aksay, Francesca Antonacci, Jacob O Kitzman, Carl Baker, Maika Malig & Evan E Eichler

  2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Can Alkan & Evan E Eichler

  3. Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Tomas Marques-Bonet

  4. School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Fereydoun Hormozdiari & S Cenk Sahinalp

  5. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Onur Mutlu

  6. Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

    Richard A Gibbs

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  1. Can Alkan
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Contributions

C.A., J.M.K., T.M.-B. and E.E.E. designed the study, performed analytical work and wrote the manuscript. C.A., F.H. and O.M. designed and implemented the mrFAST algorithm. C.A., J.M.K., G.A. and J.O.K. performed computational analysis. T.M.-B., F.A., C.B. and M.M. performed validation experiments. R.A.G. advised on handling of JDW data analysis. S.C.S. and E.E.E. obtained funding for the study.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan E Eichler.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Note, Supplementary Figures 1–7, and Supplementary Tables 1–3 and 6 (PDF 2725 kb)

Supplementary Table 4

Estimated diploid copy number for 17,601 autosomal coding genes (XLS 3961 kb)

Supplementary Table 5

Individual exons which are estimated to be copy-number variable among the three analyzed individuals (XLS 631 kb)

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Alkan, C., Kidd, J., Marques-Bonet, T. et al. Personalized copy number and segmental duplication maps using next-generation sequencing. Nat Genet 41, 1061–1067 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.437

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