Benchmarking small-variant genotyping in polyploids

  1. Gerton Lunter1,3
  1. 1MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 9DS, United Kingdom;
  2. 2Manchester Cancer Research Centre, University of Manchester, Manchester M20 4GJ, United Kingdom;
  3. 3Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen, 9713 GZ Groningen, The Netherlands
  • Corresponding author: daniel.cooke{at}me.com
  • Abstract

    Genotyping from sequencing is the basis of emerging strategies in the molecular breeding of polyploid plants. However, compared with the situation for diploids, in which genotyping accuracies are confidently determined with comprehensive benchmarks, polyploids have been neglected; there are no benchmarks measuring genotyping error rates for small variants using real sequencing reads. We previously introduced a variant calling method, Octopus, that accurately calls germline variants in diploids and somatic mutations in tumors. Here, we evaluate Octopus and other popular tools on whole-genome tetraploid and hexaploid data sets created using in silico mixtures of diploid Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) samples. We find that genotyping errors are abundant for typical sequencing depths but that Octopus makes 25% fewer errors than other methods on average. We supplement our benchmarks with concordance analysis in real autotriploid banana data sets.

    Footnotes

    • [Supplemental material is available for this article.]

    • Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at https://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.275579.121.

    • Freely available online through the Genome Research Open Access option.

    • Received March 30, 2021.
    • Accepted December 19, 2021.

    This article, published in Genome Research, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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