2018/09/08 by Fabrizio Mafessoni, Rashmi B. Prasad, Leif Groop +2 · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Genetic Associations and Epidemiology #Gene expression and cancer classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/gbe/evy199
openalex publication_date 2018/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
It is often unavoidable to combine data from different sequencing centers or sequencing platforms when compiling data sets with a large number of individuals. However, the different data are likely to contain specific systematic errors that will appear as SNPs. Here, we devise a method to detect systematic errors in combined data sets. To measure quality differences between individual genomes, we study pairs of variants that reside on different chromosomes and co-occur in individuals. The abundance of these pairs of variants in different genomes is then used to detect systematic errors due to batch effects. Applying our method to the 1000 Genomes data set, we find that coding regions are enriched for errors, where ∼1% of the higher frequency variants are predicted to be erroneous, whereas errors outside of coding regions are much rarer (<0.001%). As expected, predicted errors are found less often than other variants in a data set that was generated with a different sequencing technology, indicating that many of the candidates are indeed errors. However, predicted 1000 Genomes errors are also found in other large data sets; our observation is thus not specific to the 1000 Genomes data set. Our results show that batch effects can be turned into a virtue by using the resulting variation in large scale data sets to detect systematic errors.