Whole genome sequencing of elite athletes.

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) has great potential to explore all possible DNA variants associated with physical performance, psychological traits and health conditions of athletes. Here we present, for the first time, annotation of genomic variants of elite athletes, based on the WGS of 20 Tatar male wrestlers. The maximum number of high-quality variants per sample was over 3.8 M for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and about 0.64 M for indels. The maximum number of nonsense mutations was 148 single nucleotide variants (SNVs) per individual. Athletes' genomes on average contained 18.9 nonsense SNPs in a homozygous state per sample, while non-athletes' exomes (Tatar controls, n = 19) contained 18 nonsense SNPs. Finally, we applied genomic data for the association analysis and used reaction time (RT) as an example. Out of 1884 known genome-wide significant SNPs related to RT, we identified four SNPs ( rs10125715, rs518013, rs7783359, rs80054135) associated with RT in wrestlers. The cumulative number of favourable alleles ( A, A, T, T) was significantly correlated with RT both in wrestlers ( = 0.0003) and an independent cohort ( = 43) of physically active subjects ( = 0.029). Furthermore, we found that the frequencies of the A (53.3 vs 44.0%, = 0.033) and T (7.5 vs 2.8%, = 0.009) alleles were significantly higher in elite athletes (n = 107) involved in sports with RT as an essential component of performance (combat sports, table tennis and volleyball) compared to less successful (n = 176) athletes. The T allele was also over-represented in elite athletes (7.5%) in comparison with 189 controls (2.9%, = 0.009). In conclusion, we present the first WGS study of athletes showing that WGS can be applied in sport and exercise science.