Copy number variants (CNVs) play an important role in many biological processes, including the development of genetic diseases, making them attractive targets for genetic analyses. The interpretation of the effect of these structural variants is a challenging problem due to highly variable numbers of gene, regulatory, or other genomic elements affected by the CNV. This led to the demand for the interpretation tools that would relieve researchers, laboratory diagnosticians, genetic counselors, and clinical geneticists from the laborious process of annotation and classification of CNVs. We designed and validated a prediction method (ISV; Interpretation of Structural Variants) that is based on boosted trees which takes into account annotations of CNVs from several publicly available databases. The presented approach achieved more than 98% prediction accuracy on both copy number loss and copy number gain variants while also allowing CNVs being assigned “uncertain” significance in predictions. We believe that ISV’s prediction capability and explainability have a great potential to guide users to more precise interpretations and classifications of CNVs.
Motivation: Short tandem repeats (STRs) are regions of a genome containing many consecutive copies of the same short motif, possibly with small variations. Analysis of STRs has many clinical uses, but is limited by technology mainly due to STRs surpassing the used read length. Nanopore sequencing, as one of long read sequencing technologies, produces very long reads, thus offering more possibilities to study and analyze STRs. Basecalling of nanopore reads is however particularly unreliable in repeating regions, and therefore direct analysis from raw nanopore data is required. Results: Here we present WarpSTR, a novel method for characterizing both simple and complex tandem repeats directly from raw nanopore signals using a finite-state automaton and a search algorithm analogous to dynamic time warping. By applying this approach to determine the lengths of 241 STRs, we demonstrate that our approach decreases the mean absolute error of the STR length estimate compared to basecalling and STRique. Availability: WarpSTR is freely available at https://github.com/fmfi-compbio/warpstr
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