No abstract

Recent statistical analyses suggest that sequencing of pooled samples provides a cost effective approach to determine genome-wide population genetic parameters. Here we introduce PoPoolation, a toolbox specifically designed for the population genetic analysis of sequence data from pooled individuals. PoPoolation calculates estimates of θ Watterson, θ π, and Tajima's D that account for the bias introduced by pooling and sequencing errors, as well as divergence between species. Results of genome-wide analyses can be graphically displayed in a sliding window plot. PoPoolation is written in Perl and R and it builds on commonly used data formats. Its source code can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/popoolation/. Furthermore, we evaluate the influence of mapping algorithms, sequencing errors, and read coverage on the accuracy of population genetic parameter estimates from pooled data.

Next generation sequencing (NGS) is about to revolutionize genetic analysis. Currently NGS techniques are mainly used to sequence individual genomes. Due to the high sequence coverage required, the costs for population-scale analyses are still too high to allow an extension to nonmodel organisms. Here, we show that NGS of pools of individuals is often more effective in SNP discovery and provides more accurate allele frequency estimates, even when taking sequencing errors into account. We modify the population genetic estimators Tajima's p and Watterson's u to obtain unbiased estimates from NGS pooling data. Given the same sequencing effort, the resulting estimators often show a better performance than those obtained from individual sequencing. Although our analysis also shows that NGS of pools of individuals will not be preferable under all circumstances, it provides a cost-effective approach to estimate allele frequencies on a genome-wide scale. N EXT generation sequencing (NGS) is about to revolutionize biology. Through a massive parallelization, NGS provides an enormous number of reads, which permits sequencing of entire genomes at a fraction of the costs for Sanger sequencing. Hence, for the first time it has become feasible to obtain the complete genomic sequence for a large number of individuals. For several organisms, including humans, Drosophila melanogaster, and Arabidopsis thaliana, large resequencing projects are well on their way. Nevertheless, despite the enormous cost reduction, genome sequencing on a population scale is still out of reach for the budget of most laboratories. The extraction of as much statistical information as possible at cost as low as possible has therefore already attracted considerable interest. See, for instance, Jiang et al. Current genome-wide resequencing projects collect the sequences individual by individual. To obtain full coverage of the entire genome and to have high confidence that all heterozygous sites were discovered, it is required that genomes are sequenced at a sufficiently high coverage. As many of the reads provide only redundant information, cost could be reduced by a more effective sampling strategy.In this report, we explore the potential of DNA pooling to provide a more cost-effective approach for SNP discovery and genome-wide population genetics. Sequencing a large pool of individuals simultaneously keeps the number of redundant DNA reads low and provides thus an economic alternative to the sequencing of individual genomes. On the other hand, more care has to be taken to establish an appropriate control of sequencing errors. Obviously haplotype information is not available from pooling experiments, but this will often be outweighed by the increased accuracy in population genetic inference.Focusing on biallelic loci, our analysis shows that with sufficiently large pool sizes, pooling usually outperforms the separate sequencing of individuals, both for estimating allele frequencies and for inference of population genetic parameters. When sequencing...