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Integrating common and rare genetic variation in diverse human populations

Abstract

Despite great progress in identifying genetic variants that influence human disease, most inherited risk remains unexplained. A more complete understanding requires genome-wide studies that fully examine less common alleles in populations with a wide range of ancestry. To inform the design and interpretation of such studies, we genotyped 1.6 million common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 1,184 reference individuals from 11 global populations, and sequenced ten 100-kilobase regions in 692 of these individuals. This integrated data set of common and rare alleles, called ‘HapMap 3’, includes both SNPs and copy number polymorphisms (CNPs). We characterized population-specific differences among low-frequency variants, measured the improvement in imputation accuracy afforded by the larger reference panel, especially in imputing SNPs with a minor allele frequency of ≤5%, and demonstrated the feasibility of imputing newly discovered CNPs and SNPs. This expanded public resource of genome variants in global populations supports deeper interrogation of genomic variation and its role in human disease, and serves as a step towards a high-resolution map of the landscape of human genetic variation.

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Figure 1: Size and frequency spectra of common and rare CNPs.
Figure 2: SNP discovery informativeness across populations.
Figure 3: Effect of sample size on SNP ascertainment.
Figure 4: Haplotype sharing around SNPs and CNPs.
Figure 5: Imputation accuracy and reference panel size.
Figure 6: Imputation: new populations, new variants.

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Acknowledgements

We dedicate this work to Leena Peltonen for her vital leadership role in this study, and in memory of a valued friend and colleague. We thank E. Boerwinkle and R. Durbin for critical reading of the manuscript. We thank the USA National Institutes of Health, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and the Wellcome Trust for supporting the majority of this work. Funding was also provided by the Louis-Jeantet Foundation and the NCCR ‘Frontiers in Genetics’ (Swiss National Science Foundation). We thank the people from the following communities who were generous in donating their blood samples to be studied in this project: the Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; the Maasai in Kinyawa, Kenya; the Luhya in Webuye, Kenya; the Han Chinese in Beijing, China; the Japanese in Tokyo, Japan; the Chinese in metropolitan Denver, Colorado; the Gujarati Indians in Houston, Texas; the Toscani in Italia; the community of African ancestry in the southwestern USA; and the community of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles, California. We also thank the people in the Utah Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain community who allowed the samples they donated earlier to be used for the project. The authors acknowledge use of DNA from the 1958 British birth cohort collection, funded by the UK Medical Research Council grant G0000934 and the Wellcome Trust grant 068545/Z/02. The Illumina 550K genotype data for the 1958 British birth cohort samples were made available by the Sanger Institute. For the 1958 British birth cohort Affymetrix 500K genotype data, we thank the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (http://www.wtccc.org.uk), which was funded by Wellcome Trust award 076113.

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Correspondence to David M. Altshuler, Richard A. Gibbs, David M. Altshuler, Richard A. Gibbs, David M. Altshuler, Richard A. Gibbs, Richard A. Gibbs or Richard A. Gibbs.

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The author declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

The HapMap 3/ENCODE 3 data set has been deposited at http://www.hapmap.org. The sequence traces of ENCODE 3 can be accessed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/trace.cgi by submitting the query:species_code5“HOMO SAPIENS” and CENTER_NAME 5 “BCM” and CENTER_PROJECT 5 “RHIAY”.

A list of participants and their affiliations appears at the end of the paper

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Information comprising Introduction, Large Scale Genotyping, Rare Allele Calling Bias, Deep PCR Sequencing, Copy Number Polymorphism (CNP) Analysis, Population Analyses, Recurrent SNPs and Haplotype sharing (see Contents page for full details). It also includes Supplementary Tables 1-11, Supplementary Figures 1-9 with legends and additional references. (PDF 1111 kb)

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The International HapMap 3 Consortium. Integrating common and rare genetic variation in diverse human populations. Nature 467, 52–58 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09298

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