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Background

Despite continuing technological advances, the cost for large-scale genotyping of a high number of samples can be prohibitive. The purpose of this study is to design a cost-saving strategy for SNP genotyping. We suggest making use of pooling, a group testing technique, to drop the amount of SNP arrays needed. We believe that this will be of the greatest importance for non-model organisms with more limited resources in terms of cost-efficient large-scale chips and high-quality reference genomes, such as application in wildlife monitoring, plant and animal breeding, but it is in essence species-agnostic. The proposed approach consists in grouping and mixing individual DNA samples into pools before testing these pools on bead-chips, such that the number of pools is less than the number of individual samples. We present a statistical estimation algorithm, based on the pooling outcomes, for inferring marker-wise the most likely genotype of every sample in each pool. Finally, we input these estimated genotypes into existing imputation algorithms. We compare the imputation performance from pooled data with the Beagle algorithm, and a local likelihood-aware phasing algorithm closely modeled on MaCH that we implemented.

Results

We conduct simulations based on human data from the 1000 Genomes Project, to aid comparison with other imputation studies. Based on the simulated data, we find that pooling impacts the genotype frequencies of the directly identifiable markers, without imputation. We also demonstrate how a combinatorial estimation of the genotype probabilities from the pooling design can improve the prediction performance of imputation models. Our algorithm achieves 93% concordance in predicting unassayed markers from pooled data, thus it outperforms the Beagle imputation model which reaches 80% concordance. We observe that the pooling design gives higher concordance for the rare variants than traditional low-density to high-density imputation commonly used for cost-effective genotyping of large cohorts.

Conclusions

We present promising results for combining a pooling scheme for SNP genotyping with computational genotype imputation on human data. These results could find potential applications in any context where the genotyping costs form a limiting factor on the study size, such as in marker-assisted selection in plant breeding.

For applications with biallelic genetic markers, group testing techniques, synonymous to pooling techniques, are usually applied for decreasing the cost of large-scale testing as e.g. when detecting carriers of rare genetic variants. In some configurations, the results of the grouped tests cannot be decoded and the pooled items are missing. Inference of these missing items can be performed with specific statistical methods that are for example related to the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Pooling has also been applied for determining the genotype of markers in large populations. The particularity of full genotype data for diploid organisms in the context of group testing are the ternary outcomes (two homozygous genotypes and one heterozygous), as well as the distribution of these three outcomes in a population, which is often ruled by the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium and depends on the allele frequency in such situation. When using a nonoverlapping repeated block pooling design, the missing items are only observed in particular arrangements. Overall, a data set of pooled genotypes can be described as an inference problem in Missing Not At Random data with nonmonotone missingness patterns. This study presents a preliminary investigation of the consistency of various iterative methods estimating the most likely genotype probabilities of the missing items in pooled data. We use the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the L2 distance between the genotype distribution computed from our estimates and a simulated empirical distribution as a measure of the distributional consistency.

The plant breeding industry has shown growing interest in using the genotype data of relevant markers for performing selection of new competitive varieties. The selection usually benefits from large amounts of marker data and it is therefore crucial to dispose of data collection methods that are both cost-effective and reliable. Computational methods such as genotype imputation have been proposed earlier in several plant science studies for addressing the cost challenge. Genotype imputation methods have though been used more frequently and investigated more extensively in human genetics research. The various algorithms that exist have shown lower accuracy at inferring the genotype of genetic variants occurring at low frequency, while these rare variants can have great significance and impact in the genetic studies that underlie selection. In contrast, pooling is a technique that can efficiently identify low-frequency items in a population and it has been successfully used for detecting the samples that carry rare variants in a population. In this study, we propose to combine pooling and imputation, and demonstrate this by simulating a hypothetical microarray for genotyping a population of recombinant inbred lines in a cost-effective and accurate manner, even for rare variants. We show that with an adequate imputation model, it is feasible to accurately predictthe individual genotypes at lower cost than sample-wise genotyping and time-effectively. Moreover, we provide code resources for reproducing the results presented in this study in the form of a containerized workflow.

Conducting genomic selection in plant breeding programs can substantially speed up the development of new varieties. Genomic selection provides more reliable insights when it is based on dense marker data, in which the rare variants can be particularly informative. Despite the availability of new technologies, the cost of large-scale genotyping remains a major limitation to the implementation of genomic selection. We suggest to combine pooled genotyping with population-based imputation as a cost-effective computational strategy for genotyping SNPs. Pooling saves genotyping tests and has proven to accurately capture the rare variants that are usually missed by imputation. In this study, we investigate adding iterative coupling to a joint model of pooling and imputation that we have previously proposed. In each iteration, the imputed genotype probabilities serve as feedback input for adjusting the per-sample prior genotype probabilities, before running a new imputation based on these adjusted data. This flexible setup indirectly imposes consistency between the imputed genotypes and the pooled observations. We demonstrate that repeated cycles of feedback can take advantage of the strengths in both pooling and imputation when an appropriate set of reference haplotypes is available for imputation. The iterations improve greatly upon the initial genotype predictions, achieving very high genotype accuracy for both low and high frequency variants. We enhance the average concordance from 94.5% to 98.4% at limited computational cost and without requiring any additional genotype testing.