Ranbow: A fast and accurate method for polyploid haplotype reconstruction

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 May 29;16(5):e1007843. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007843. eCollection 2020 May.

Abstract

Reconstructing haplotypes from sequencing data is one of the major challenges in genetics. Haplotypes play a crucial role in many analyses, including genome-wide association studies and population genetics. Haplotype reconstruction becomes more difficult for higher numbers of homologous chromosomes, as it is often the case for polyploid plants. This complexity is compounded further by higher heterozygosity, which denotes the frequent presence of variants between haplotypes. We have designed Ranbow, a new tool for haplotype reconstruction of polyploid genome from short read sequencing data. Ranbow integrates all types of small variants in bi- and multi-allelic sites to reconstruct haplotypes. To evaluate Ranbow and currently available competing methods on real data, we have created and released a real gold standard dataset from sweet potato sequencing data. Our evaluations on real and simulated data clearly show Ranbow's superior performance in terms of accuracy, haplotype length, memory usage, and running time. Specifically, Ranbow is one order of magnitude faster than the next best method. The efficiency and accuracy of Ranbow makes whole genome haplotype reconstruction of complex genome with higher ploidy feasible.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Datasets as Topic
  • Haplotypes*
  • Heterozygote
  • Humans
  • Polyploidy*

Grants and funding

M-HM acknowledges support from IMPRS-CBSC doctoral programme. JY acknowledges funding support by National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFD1000700-2018YFD1000701-4), Shanghai Municipal Afforestation & City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation Administration (G182402, G192413, and G192414), and Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.