Abstract
It is computationally challenging to detect variation by aligning single-molecule sequencing (SMS) reads, or contigs from SMS assemblies. One approach to efficiently align SMS reads is sparse dynamic programming (SDP), where optimal chains of exact matches are found between the sequence and the genome. While straightforward implementations of SDP penalize gaps with a cost that is a linear function of gap length, biological variation is more accurately represented when gap cost is a concave function of gap length. We have developed a method, lra, that uses SDP with a concave-cost gap penalty, and used lra to align long-read sequences from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore (ONT) instruments as well as de novo assembly contigs. This alignment approach increases sensitivity and specificity for SV discovery, particularly for variants above 1kb and when discovering variation from ONT reads, while having runtime that are comparable (1.05-3.76×) to current methods. When applied to calling variation from de novo assembly contigs, there is a 3.2% increase in Truvari F1 score compared to minimap2+htsbox. lra is available in bioconda (https://anaconda.org/bioconda/lra) and github (https://github.com/ChaissonLab/LRA).
Highlights
Studies of genetic variation often begin by aligning sequences from a sample back to a reference genome, and inferring variation as differences in the alignment
Long-read single-molecule sequencing has been shown to help discover structural variation because the reads span across the entire variant
We demonstrate a method, lra, that uses an efficient implementation of concave-cost alignment for structural variant discovery using long reads
Summary
Studies of genetic variation often begin by aligning sequences from a sample back to a reference genome, and inferring variation as differences in the alignment. The two technologies that produce LRS technologies, Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and Oxford Nanopore (ONT) generate reads over 50kb at error rate 15% or less. Aligning these sequences is a computationally challenging task for which several methods are available including minimap, ngmlr, and BLASR [1,2,3]. They are demonstrated to be quite fast and accurate, but have limitations, when there are large sequence differences between the read and the reference. This problem is amplified in complex, repetitive regions such as variable-number tandem repeats, that only make up 3% of the human genome, but account for nearly 70% of observed structural variation: insertions and deletions at least 50 bases (SV), and in larger SV [4]
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