Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California.
Institute of Biomedicine and Translational Medicine, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
Hum Mutat. 2019 Sep;40(9):1373-1391. doi: 10.1002/humu.23874. Epub 2019 Sep 3.
Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) holds great potential as a diagnostic test. However, the majority of patients currently undergoing WGS lack a molecular diagnosis, largely due to the vast number of undiscovered disease genes and our inability to assess the pathogenicity of most genomic variants. The CAGI SickKids challenges attempted to address this knowledge gap by assessing state-of-the-art methods for clinical phenotype prediction from genomes. CAGI4 and CAGI5 participants were provided with WGS data and clinical descriptions of 25 and 24 undiagnosed patients from the SickKids Genome Clinic Project, respectively. Predictors were asked to identify primary and secondary causal variants. In addition, for CAGI5, groups had to match each genome to one of three disorder categories (neurologic, ophthalmologic, and connective), and separately to each patient. The performance of matching genomes to categories was no better than random but two groups performed significantly better than chance in matching genomes to patients. Two of the ten variants proposed by two groups in CAGI4 were deemed to be diagnostic, and several proposed pathogenic variants in CAGI5 are good candidates for phenotype expansion. We discuss implications for improving in silico assessment of genomic variants and identifying new disease genes.
全基因组测序(WGS)作为一种诊断测试具有巨大的潜力。然而,目前大多数接受 WGS 的患者都没有分子诊断,这主要是由于尚未发现大量疾病基因,以及我们无法评估大多数基因组变异的致病性。CAGI SickKids 挑战赛试图通过评估从基因组预测临床表型的最先进方法来填补这一知识空白。CAGI4 和 CAGI5 的参与者分别获得了 SickKids 基因组诊所项目的 25 名和 24 名未确诊患者的 WGS 数据和临床描述。要求预测者识别主要和次要因果变异。此外,对于 CAGI5,各组必须将每个基因组与三个疾病类别之一(神经、眼科和结缔组织)匹配,并分别与每个患者匹配。将基因组与类别进行匹配的性能并不优于随机,但有两组在将基因组与患者进行匹配方面的表现明显优于随机。CAGI4 中的两组提出的十个变体中有两个被认为是诊断性的,CAGI5 中的几个提出的致病性变体是表型扩展的良好候选者。我们讨论了改进基因组变异的计算评估和识别新疾病基因的影响。