Journal:Bioinformatics workflow for clinical whole genome sequencing at Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine

Full article title	Bioinformatics workflow for clinical whole genome sequencing at Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine
Journal	Journal of Personalized Medicine
Author(s)	Tsai, E.A.; Shakbatyan, R.; Evan, J.; Rossetti, P.; Graham, C.; Sharma, H.; Lin, C.-F., Lebo, M.S.
Author affiliation(s)	Partners HealthCare, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Primary contact	Tel.: +1-617-768-8292
Editors	Weiss, S.T.; Liggett, S.B.
Year published	2016
Volume and issue	6(1)
Page(s)	12
DOI	10.3390/jpm6010012
ISSN	2075-4426
Distribution license	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Website	http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4426/6/1/12/htm
Download	http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4426/6/1/12/pdf (PDF)

Abstract

Effective implementation of precision medicine will be enhanced by a thorough understanding of each patient’s genetic composition to better treat his or her presenting symptoms or mitigate the onset of disease. This ideally includes the sequence information of a complete genome for each individual. At Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine, we have developed a clinical process for whole genome sequencing (WGS) with application in both healthy individuals and those with disease. In this manuscript, we will describe our bioinformatics strategy to efficiently process and deliver genomic data to geneticists for clinical interpretation. We describe the handling of data from FASTQ to the final variant list for clinical review for the final report. We will also discuss our methodology for validating this workflow and the cost implications of running WGS.

Keywords: clinical sequencing, WGS, NGS, next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, validation, precision medicine

Introduction

Precision medicine is becoming an increasing focus in medical research. To achieve the resolution necessary to personalize clinical care, greater attention has been drawn towards higher resolution of the patient genome. Next generation sequencing (NGS) provided a cost-effective method for targeted sequencing of known disease genes at base pair resolution. Moreover, the advent of exome sequencing enabled rapid discovery of genes causing Mendelian disorders. While gene panels and exome sequencing have proved fast and cost-effective for delivering genomic results back to the patient, these technologies are limited by our current knowledge of the exome, which changes over time. Additionally, the use of targeted capture may introduce biases to the data, including PCR duplicates, depth of coverage disparities, and failures at difficult to amplify target regions.

Practical considerations such as sequencing costs, data processing and maintenance, and data analysis complexities are important considerations when a laboratory is considering a new NGS program. These issues are amplified in whole genome sequencing (WGS) due to the volume of the data and have long been barriers to entry for clinical laboratories looking to adopt WGS. Despite the ability of WGS to interrogate the entirety of the genome, clinical interpretation still often focuses on only 3% of the genome (i.e., exome data, pharmacogenomics risk variants, and single nucleotide variants associated with complex disease risk). Therefore, WGS services may be overlooked for clinical applications as they trend towards increased costs and longer turnaround times due to a heavier computational load, increased number of variants for analysis, and larger data archives. However, the steadily decreasing cost of sequencing and storage now allow laboratories to consider genome sequencing. WGS, and more specifically PCR-free WGS, also decreases the need to re-sequence each time the coding sequences of targeted regions change, novel genes are discovered, or a new reference genome is released. The balance between cost, turnaround time, accuracy, and completeness has to be addressed when launching a WGS program. Here, we describe the workflow we adopted and the challenges we met supporting the bioinformatics of WGS in a clinical setting.

Results

Bioinformatics validation

Our pipeline performs robustly as different entry points and different runs of the same sample returned exactly the same variants. Using HapMap sample NA12878 and previous Sanger confirmed regions, we identified thresholds for variants of Quality by Depth (QD) ≥ 4 and Fisher Strand Bias (FS) ≤ 30 as providing the optimal balance of sensitivity and specificity. This sample has been well characterized by our laboratory and also by other groups. Of 425 total confirmed variants, all 425 variants were detected by genome sequencing for a sensitivity of 100% (95% CI: 99.1%–100% for SNVs and 79.6%–100% for indels; Table 1a). In addition, four likely reference sequence errors, positions where only the alternative allele has ever been identified, were correctly genotyped by genome sequencing as homozygous for the alternative allele, three of which had incorrect genotype calls with previous orthogonal assays. In addition to these true positive variants, calls were also made for 21 false positive (FP) variants, including 20 substitutions and one indel (Table 1b). After filtration of variants based on optimal QD and FS thresholds discussed, only one FP remained.

Table 1. Sensitivity and Specificity of WGS. Utilizing HapMap sample NA12878, we previously identified and confirmed via Sanger sequencing 425 variants in 195 genes across ~700 kb of sequence. (a) Analysis of raw variants identified 21 false positive (FP) variants within this region of NA12878. After application of laboratory-defined thresholds (FS ≤ 30 and QD ≥ 4), this limited the number of FP to only one with no increase in false negatives (FN). (b) All 425 Sanger confirmed variants were identified in the WGS data above our quality thresholds. (c) Concordance with 1000 Genomes data for variants across the genome was high, particularly for SNVs. Concordance remained high when matching on predicted genotype. (a) Specificity Variant type FP (before Thresholds) FP (after Thresholds) SNVs 20 1 Indels 1 0 (b) Sensitivity Variant type # FN Sensitivity 95% Cl SNVs 410 0 100% 99.1%–100% Indels 15 0 100% 79.6%–100% (c) Concordance with 1000 Genomes data Variant type 1K Genomes Variants Present in NGS Calls % Present in NGS Calls Present in NGS Calls with Matched Genotypes % Present in NGS Calls with Matched Genotypes SNVs 2,762,933 2,735,592 99.01% 2,730,826 98.84% Indels 327,474 299,300 91.39% 285,401 87.15% Total 3,090,407 3,034,892 98.20% 3,016,227 97.60%

Notes

This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added.