Biology subjects

Schönhuth, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Schönhuth, A..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

DiVerG: Scalable Distance Index for Validation of Paired-End Alignments in Sequence Graphs

Determining the distance between two loci within a genomic region is a recurrent operation in various tasks in computational genomics. A notable example of this task arises in paired-end read mapping as a form of validation of distances between multiple alignments. While straightforward for a single genome, graph-based reference structures render the operation considerably more involved. Given the sheer number of such queries in a typical read mapping experiment, an efficient algorithm for answering distance queries is crucial. In this paper, we introduce DiVerG, a compact data structure as well as a fast and scalable algorithm, for constructing distance indexes for general sequence graphs on multi-core CPU and many-core GPU architectures. DiVerG is based on PairG [28], but overcomes the limitations of PairG by exploiting the extensive potential for improvements in terms of scalability and space efficiency. As a consequence, DiVerG can process substantially larger datasets, such as whole human genomes, which are unmanageable by PairG. DiVerG offers faster index construction time and consistently faster query time with gains proportional to the size of the underlying compact data structure. We demonstrate that our method performs favorably on multiple real datasets at various scales. DiVerG achieves superior performance over PairG; e.g. resulting to 2.5-4x speed-up in query time, 44-340x smaller index size, and 3-50x faster construction time for the genome graph of the MHC region, as a particularly variable region of the human genome. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/cartoonist/diverg

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

ProSolo: Accurate Variant Calling from Single Cell DNA Sequencing Data

Obtaining accurate mutational profiles from single cell DNA is essential for the analysis of genomic cell-to-cell heterogeneity at the finest level of resolution. However, sequencing libraries suitable for genotyping require whole genome amplification, which introduces allelic bias and copy errors. As a result, single cell DNA sequencing data violates the assumptions of variant callers developed for bulk sequencing, which when applied to single cells generate significant numbers of false positives and false negatives. Only dedicated models accounting for amplification bias and errors will be able to provide more accurate calls. We present ProSolo, a probabilistic model for calling single nucleotide variants from multiple displacement amplified single cell DNA sequencing data. It introduces a mechanistically motivated empirical model of amplification bias that improves the quantification of genotyping uncertainty. To account for amplification errors, it jointly models the single cell sample with a bulk sequencing sample from the same cell population--also enabling a biologically relevant imputation of missing genotypes for the single cell. Through these innovations, ProSolo achieves substantially higher performance in calling and genotyping single nucleotide variants in single cells in comparison to all state-of-the-art tools. Moreover, ProSolo implements the first approach to control the false discovery rate reliably and flexibly; not only for single nucleotide variant calls, but also for artefacts of single cell methodology that one may wish to identify, such as allele dropout. ProSolos model is implemented into a flexible framework, encouraging extensions. The source code and usage instructions are available at: https://github.com/prosolo/prosolo

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Enhancing sensitivity and controlling false discovery rate in somatic indel discovery

As witnessed by various population-scale cancer genome sequencing projects, accurate discovery of somatic variants has become of central importance in modern cancer research. However, count statistics on somatic insertions and deletions (indels) discovered so far point out that large amounts of discoveries must have been missed. The reason is that the combination of uncertainties relating to, for example, gap and alignment ambiguities, twilight zone indels, cancer heterogeneity, sample purity, sampling and strand bias are hard to accurately quantify. Here, a unifying statistical model is provided whose dependency structures enable to accurately quantify all inherent uncertainties in short time. As major consequence, false discovery rate (FDR) in somatic indel discovery can now be controlled at utmost accuracy. As demonstrated on simulated and real data, this enables to dramatically increase the amount of true discoveries while safely suppressing the FDR. Specifically supported by workflow design, our approach can be integrated as a post-processing step in large-scale projects.\n\nThe software is publicly available at https://varlociraptor.github.io and can be easily installed via Bioconda1 [Gruning et al., 2018].

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

MALVA: genotyping by Mapping-free ALlele detection of known VAriants

The amount of genetic variation discovered and characterized in human populations is huge, and is growing rapidly with the widespread availability of modern sequencing technologies. Such a great deal of variation data, that accounts for human diversity, leads to various challenging computational tasks, including variant calling and genotyping of newly sequenced individuals. The standard pipelines for addressing these problems include read mapping, which is a computationally expensive procedure. A few mapping-free tools were proposed in recent years to speed up the genotyping process. While such tools have highly efficient run-times, they focus on isolated, bi-allelic SNPs, providing limited support for multi-allelic SNPs, indels, and genomic regions with high variant density.\n\nTo address these issues, we introduce MALVA, a fast and lightweight mapping-free method to genotype an individual directly from a sample of reads. MALVA is the first mapping-free tool that is able to genotype multi-allelic SNPs and indels, even in high density genomic regions, and to effectively handle a huge number of variants such as those provided by the 1000 Genome Project. An experimental evaluation on whole-genome data shows that MALVA requires one order of magnitude less time to genotype a donor than alignment-based pipelines, providing similar accuracy. Remarkably, on indels, MALVA provides even better results than the most widely adopted variant discovery tools.

bioinformatics↗