TY - JOUR T1 - The Landscape of Human STR Variation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/004671 SP - 004671 AU - Thomas Willems AU - Melissa Gymrek AU - Gareth Highnam AU - The 1000 Genomes Project AU - David Mittelman AU - Yaniv Erlich Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/04/30/004671.abstract N2 - Short Tandem Repeats are among the most polymorphic loci in the human genome. These loci play a role in the etiology of a range of genetic diseases and have been frequently utilized in forensics, population genetics, and genetic genealogy. Despite this plethora of applications, little is known about the variation of most STRs in the human population. Here, we report the largest-scale analysis of human STR variation to date. We collected information for nearly 700,000 STR loci across over 1,000 individuals in phase 1 of the 1000 Genomes Project. This process nearly saturated common STR variations. After employing a series of quality controls, we utilize this call set to analyze determinants of STR variation, assess the human reference genome’s representation of STR alleles, find STR loci with common loss-of-function alleles, and obtain initial estimates of the linkage disequilibrium between STRs and common SNPs. Overall, these analyses further elucidate the scale of genetic variation beyond classical point mutations. The resource is publicly available at http://strcat.teamerlich.org/ both in raw format and via a graphical interface. ER -