Abstract
Many genetic variants that influence phenotypes of interest are located outside of protein-coding genes, yet existing methods for identifying such variants have poor predictive power. Here we introduce a new computational method, called LINSIGHT, that substantially improves the prediction of noncoding nucleotide sites at which mutations are likely to have deleterious fitness consequences, and which, therefore, are likely to be phenotypically important. LINSIGHT combines a generalized linear model for functional genomic data with a probabilistic model of molecular evolution. The method is fast and highly scalable, enabling it to exploit the 'big data' available in modern genomics. We show that LINSIGHT outperforms the best available methods in identifying human noncoding variants associated with inherited diseases. In addition, we apply LINSIGHT to an atlas of human enhancers and show that the fitness consequences at enhancers depend on cell type, tissue specificity, and constraints at associated promoters.
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Acknowledgements
We thank I. Gronau for comments on the manuscript and members of the Siepel laboratory for helpful discussions. This research was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants GM102192 (A.S.) and HG008901 (A.S.). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
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Y.-F.H. and A.S. conceived and designed the study; Y.-F.H. designed and implemented the LINSIGHT method; Y.-F.H. and B.G. analyzed the data; A.S. supervised the research; Y.-F.H. and A.S. wrote the manuscript with review and feedback from B.G.
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Integrated supplementary information
Supplementary Figure 1 Spearman's correlation coefficients (ρ) for all pairs of scores considered.
(a) Correlation at all scored genomic positions. (b) Correlation at sites in mammalian phastCons elements.
Supplementary Figure 2 Prediction power of various computational methods for distinguishing curated transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) from likely non-TFBSs, described as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.
Results are shown for the (a) "matched TSS" and (b) "matched region" schemes for pairing positive and negative examples (see Methods). We considered all TFBSs in the ORegAnno database14 that were associated with the hg19 assembly, pooling the data for all TFs and merging overlapping binding sites (7,369 TFBSs in total). The negative controls were matched by distance or region to the pooled set.
Supplementary Figure 3 Additional examples of known disease variants detected by LINSIGHT.
(a) LINSIGHT highlights a disease variant in a promoter region of the TDO2 gene from the HGMD database (CR045670). The whole region, even though is only a few hundred base pairs away from the TSS of the TDO2 gene, is not well conserved, as is evident by the low phastCons scores. In contrast, LINSIGHT predicts that dozens of bases in this region, including the variant CR045670, are under constraint because they overlap with predicted TFBSs, e.g., rVISTA TFBSs and SwissRegulon TFBSs. The variant CR045670 is supported by both the rVISTA and SwissRegulon databases but does not have high conservation scores, which highlights the importance of integrating a large number of complementary genomic features. (b) LINSIGHT highlights a splicing variant (rs173356864) related to Hurler syndrome17. Even though this variant is very close to an essential splice site of the IDUA gene, it is not highlighted by phyloP and GERP++. In contrast, LINSIGHT is able to identify it because LINSIGHT integrates a large number of features, including SPIDEX and phastCons both of which support the significance of this variant. The SPIDEX track shows the maximum of absolute SPIDEX scores (absolute z-scores) over all the three alternative variants at a position. Because LINSIGHT is trained on noncoding sequences, its scores are undefined in coding regions.
Supplementary Figure 4 Genomic distributions of noncoding disease variants in the ClinVar (left) and HGMD (right) data sets.
See Methods for definitions of Promoter, Splicing, UTR, and Other genomic regions.
Supplementary Figure 5 Prediction power of various computational methods for distinguishing disease-associated noncoding variants from variants not likely to have phenotypic effects.
Plots are similar to Figure 3 except that power is quantified using the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) statistic.
Supplementary Figure 6 Prediction power of various computational methods for distinguishing disease-associated noncoding variants from variants not likely to have phenotypic effects.
Plots are similar to Figure 3 except that singleton variants in the 1000 Genomes Project phase 3 data set were used as negative examples18.
Supplementary Figure 7 Prediction power of various computational methods for distinguishing disease-associated noncoding variants from variants not likely to have phenotypic effects.
Plots are similar to Supplementary Figure 6 except that power is quantified using the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) statistic.
Supplementary Figure 8 Contributions of various genomic features to the identification of disease-associated variants from HGMD and ClinVar.
The contribution of each class of genomic features is measured as the average reduction in the area under the curve (AUC) statistic resulting from the removal of those features. Results are shown for three matching schemes for positive and negative examples, and for variants in 1-kb promoters (n = 478), proximal to splicing sites (n = 65), in UTRs (n = 424), and all other variants (n = 615). The numbers of positives and negatives were matched by random subsampling, which was performed 100 times to calculate the average reduction of the AUC statistic. Error bar represents ± 1-fold standard deviation.
Supplementary Figure 9 Evolutionary constraints on enhancers.
Plots are similar to Figure 4 except that no regional features were used in the training of LINSIGHT. (a) Probability of fitness consequences for mutations in enhancers (measured by average LINSIGHT score) is positively correlated with the number of cell types in which each enhancer is active (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient ρ = 0.253; two-tailed p-value < 10−15). Results are shown for 29,303 enhancers in 69 cell types. (b) Probability of fitness consequences for mutations in enhancers is positively correlated with probability of fitness consequences for mutations in associated promoters (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient ρ = 0.156; two-tailed p-value < 10−15). Results are shown for 25,067 enhancer-promoter pairs.
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Huang, YF., Gulko, B. & Siepel, A. Fast, scalable prediction of deleterious noncoding variants from functional and population genomic data. Nat Genet 49, 618–624 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3810
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3810
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