NDLI: Benchmarking UMI-aware and standard variant callers for low frequency ctDNA variant detection

Content Provider	Springer Nature : BioMed Central
Author	Maruzani, Rugare Brierley, Liam Jorgensen, Andrea Fowler, Anna
Abstract	Background Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) is a subset of cell free DNA (cfDNA) released by tumour cells into the bloodstream. Circulating tumour DNA has shown great potential as a biomarker to inform treatment in cancer patients. Collecting ctDNA is minimally invasive and reflects the entire genetic makeup of a patient’s cancer. ctDNA variants in NGS data can be difficult to distinguish from sequencing and PCR artefacts due to low abundance, particularly in the early stages of cancer. Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs) are short sequences ligated to the sequencing library before amplification. These sequences are useful for filtering out low frequency artefacts. The utility of ctDNA as a cancer biomarker depends on accurate detection of cancer variants. Results In this study, we benchmarked six variant calling tools, including two UMI-aware callers for their ability to call ctDNA variants. The standard variant callers tested included Mutect2, bcftools, LoFreq and FreeBayes. The UMI-aware variant callers benchmarked were UMI-VarCal and UMIErrorCorrect. We used both datasets with known variants spiked in at low frequencies, and datasets containing ctDNA, and generated synthetic UMI sequences for these datasets. Variant callers displayed different preferences for sensitivity and specificity. Mutect2 showed high sensitivity, while returning more privately called variants than any other caller in data without synthetic UMIs – an indicator of false positive variant discovery. In data encoded with synthetic UMIs, UMI-VarCal detected fewer putative false positive variants than all other callers in synthetic datasets. Mutect2 showed a balance between high sensitivity and specificity in data encoded with synthetic UMIs. Conclusions Our results indicate UMI-aware variant callers have potential to improve sensitivity and specificity in calling low frequency ctDNA variants over standard variant calling tools. There is a growing need for further development of UMI-aware variant calling tools if effective early detection methods for cancer using ctDNA samples are to be realised.
Related Links	https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s12864-024-10737-w.pdf
Ending Page	15
Page Count	15
Starting Page	1
File Format	HTM / HTML
ISSN	14712164
DOI	10.1186/s12864-024-10737-w
Journal	BMC Genomics
Issue Number	1
Volume Number	25
Language	English
Publisher	BioMed Central
Publisher Date	2024-09-03
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Life Sciences Microarrays Proteomics Animal Genetics and Genomics Microbial Genetics and Genomics Plant Genetics and Genomics Variant calling ctDNA Next generation sequencing Cancer
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Biotechnology Genetics
Journal Impact Factor	3.5/2023
5-Year Journal Impact Factor	4.1/2023

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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