Reference-based Phasing Using the Haplotype Reference Consortium Panel

Overview

Journal Nat Genet

Specialty Genetics

Date 2016 Oct 4

PMID 27694958

Citations 893

Authors

Po-Ru Loh

Petr Danecek

Pier Francesco Palamara

Christian Fuchsberger

Yakir A Reshef

Hilary K Finucane

Sebastian Schoenherr

Lukas Forer

Shane McCarthy

Goncalo R Abecasis

Richard Durbin

Alkes L Price

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Haplotype phasing is a fundamental problem in medical and population genetics. Phasing is generally performed via statistical phasing in a genotyped cohort, an approach that can yield high accuracy in very large cohorts but attains lower accuracy in smaller cohorts. Here we instead explore the paradigm of reference-based phasing. We introduce a new phasing algorithm, Eagle2, that attains high accuracy across a broad range of cohort sizes by efficiently leveraging information from large external reference panels (such as the Haplotype Reference Consortium; HRC) using a new data structure based on the positional Burrows-Wheeler transform. We demonstrate that Eagle2 attains a ∼20× speedup and ∼10% increase in accuracy compared to reference-based phasing using SHAPEIT2. On European-ancestry samples, Eagle2 with the HRC panel achieves >2× the accuracy of 1000 Genomes-based phasing. Eagle2 is open source and freely available for HRC-based phasing via the Sanger Imputation Service and the Michigan Imputation Server.

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