Single haplotype assembly of the human genome from a hydatidiform mole
- Karyn Meltz Steinberg1,
- Valerie A. Schneider2,
- Tina A. Graves-Lindsay1,
- Robert S. Fulton1,
- Richa Agarwala2,
- John Huddleston3,4,
- Sergey A. Shiryev2,
- Aleksandr Morgulis2,
- Urvashi Surti5,
- Wesley C. Warren1,
- Deanna M. Church6,
- Evan E. Eichler3,4 and
- Richard K. Wilson1
- 1The Genome Institute at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63108, USA;
- 2National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20894, USA;
- 3Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA;
- 4Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA;
- 5Department of Pathology and Human Genetics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA;
- 6Personalis, Inc., Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
- Corresponding author: rwilson{at}genome.wustl.edu
Abstract
A complete reference assembly is essential for accurately interpreting individual genomes and associating variation with phenotypes. While the current human reference genome sequence is of very high quality, gaps and misassemblies remain due to biological and technical complexities. Large repetitive sequences and complex allelic diversity are the two main drivers of assembly error. Although increasing the length of sequence reads and library fragments can improve assembly, even the longest available reads do not resolve all regions. In order to overcome the issue of allelic diversity, we used genomic DNA from an essentially haploid hydatidiform mole, CHM1. We utilized several resources from this DNA including a set of end-sequenced and indexed BAC clones and 100× Illumina whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequence coverage. We used the WGS sequence and the GRCh37 reference assembly to create an assembly of the CHM1 genome. We subsequently incorporated 382 finished BAC clone sequences to generate a draft assembly, CHM1_1.1 (NCBI AssemblyDB GCA_000306695.2). Analysis of gene, repetitive element, and segmental duplication content show this assembly to be of excellent quality and contiguity. However, comparison to assembly-independent resources, such as BAC clone end sequences and PacBio long reads, indicate misassembled regions. Most of these regions are enriched for structural variation and segmental duplication, and can be resolved in the future. This publicly available assembly will be integrated into the Genome Reference Consortium curation framework for further improvement, with the ultimate goal being a completely finished gap-free assembly.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.180893.114.
- Received July 2, 2014.
- Accepted October 7, 2014.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
