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Filtering variants for cancer mutational signature analysis

Recently, I’ve been working to help prepare a manuscript on Vestibular Schwannomas (VS), a type of benign cancer of the myelin-forming cells along the nerves of the ear.  I’ve been thinking a lot about strategies for filtering exome variant calls to feed into mutational signature analysis.

Mutational signatures are important because they describe the types of mutational processes operating on the genome of the tumor cells.  Many of these processes are known (see the COSMIC database), however, some are entirely novel.  The variants that are used for calculating such signatures are somatic in nature, and have to be carefully curated from the raw variant calls that you get from a pipeline like GATK.

Looking at the existing literature, I find that there is no common or “best practices” methodology for filtering variants in whole exome data.  Some groups are very stringent, others less so.  The first step in most cases is to just subtract normal variant calls from tumor in most cases.  However, there are further filtering steps that should be undertaken.

If I had to describe some overall commonalities in the literature approaches to somatic variant filters, it could include:

1) removing variants that are present in dbSNP or 1000genomes or other non-cancer exome data
2) taking only variants in coding regions (exons) or splicing sites
3) variants must appear in more than X reads in the tumor, and fewer than X reads in the normal (generally ~5 and ~2, respectively)
4) subtraction of “normals” from “tumor” (either pooled normals, or paired)
5) variant position must be covered by a minimum depth (usually > 10X)
6) throwing away reads from low mapping quality (MQ) regions

Some papers only consider non-synonymous variants, but for mutational signatures, to me it makes sense to take all validated variants (especially in exome data because you are starting with fewer raw variant calls than whole genome data).

As far as actual numbers of variants that are “fed” into the mutational signature analysis, most papers do not report this directly (surprisingly).  If you dig around in the SI sections, sometimes you can find it indirectly.

It looks like, generally, the number of variants is somewhere around 10,000 for papers dealing with specific tumor types (not pan-cancer analyses of public databases). Several papers end up with ~1000 variants per tumor (ranging from 1,000 up to 7,000).  So with 10 tumors sequenced, that would be 10,000 filtered, high-confidence SNVs.

If you’re working on exome mutational signature analysis and you have your own filtering criteria, I’d love for you to share it in the comments.

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Beware of biological variability in your *-Seq experiments

From this excellent paper on biological variability in RNA-Seq experiments (bold highlights are mine):

“Biological variability has important implications for the design, analysis and interpretation of RNA-sequencing experiments. […] If only a few biological replicates are available, it will be impossible to estimate the level of biological variability in expression for each gene in a study. Supplementary Table 1 summarizes a large number of published RNA-sequencing studies over the past three years. In every case, except for the two studies we analyzed here, conclusions were based on a small number (n ≤ 2) of biological replicates. One goal of RNA-sequencing studies may be simply to identify and catalog expression of new or alternative transcripts. However, all of these studies make broader biological statements on the basis of a very small set of biological replicates.

Our analysis has two important implications for studies performed with a small number of biological replicates. First, significant results in these studies may be due to biological variation and may not be reproducible; and second, it is impossible to know whether expression patterns are specific to the individuals in the study or are a characteristic of the study populations. These ideas are now widely accepted for DNA microarray experiments, where a large number of biological replicates are now required to justify scientific conclusions. Our analysis suggests that as biological variability is a fundamental characteristic of gene expression, sequencing experiments should be subject to similar requirements.”

If you are doing RNA-Seq, be very vigilant in your experimental design and find a way to incorporate more replicates, even at the expense of testing fewer comparisons.   It’s better to test one comparison (tissue X vs. Y, for example) with 5 or more replicates than to test three comparisons (Tissue X vs. Y, Y vs. Z, and X vx Z) with only 2 replicates for each tissue type.