Abstract
BACKGROUND: Haplotype information is useful for many genetic analyses and haplotypes are usually inferred using computational approaches. Among such approaches, the importance of single individual haplotyping (SIH), which infers individual haplotypes from sequence fragments, has been increasing with the advent of novel sequencing techniques, such as dilution-based sequencing. These techniques could produce virtual long read fragments by separating DNA fragments into multiple low-concentration aliquots, sequencing and mapping each aliquot, and merging clustered short reads. Although these experimental techniques are sophisticated, they have the problem of producing chimeric fragments whose left and right parts match different chromosomes. In our previous research, we found that chimeric fragments significantly decrease the accuracy of SIH. Although chimeric fragments can be removed by using haplotypes which are determined from pedigree genotypes, pedigree genotypes are generally not available. The length of reads cluster and heterozygous calls were also used to detect chimeric fragments. Although some chimeric fragments will be removed with these features, considerable number of chimeric fragments will be undetected because of the dispersion of the length and the absence of SNPs in the overlapped regions. For these reasons, a general method to detect and remove chimeric fragments is needed. RESULTS: In this paper, we propose a general method to detect chimeric fragments. The basis of our method is that a chimeric fragment would correspond to an artificial recombinant haplotype and would differ from biological haplotypes. To detect differences from biological haplotypes, we integrated statistical phasing, which is a haplotype inference approach from population genotypes, into our method. We applied our method to two datasets and detected chimeric fragments with high AUC. AUC values of our method are higher than those of just using cluster length and heterozygous calls. We then used multiple SIH algorithm to compare the accuracy of SIH before and after removing the chimeric fragment candidates. The accuracy of assembled haplotypes increased significantly after removing chimeric fragment candidates. CONCLUSIONS: Our method is useful for detecting chimeric fragments and improving SIH accuracy. The Ruby script is available at https://sites.google.com/site/hmatsu1226/software/csp.