ROH Caller
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Regions of homozygosity (ROH) are detected as part of the small variant caller. The caller detects and outputs the runs of homozygosity from whole genome calls on autosomal human chromosomes. Sex chromosomes are ignored unless the sample sex karyotype is XX, as specified on the command line or determined by the Ploidy Estimator. ROH output allows downstream tools to screen for and predict consanguinity between the parents of the proband subject.
A region is defined as consecutive variant calls on the chromosome with no large gap in between these variants. In other words, regions are broken by chromosome or by large gaps with no SNV calls. The gap size is set to 3 Mbases.
An alternative algorithm to detect ROH regions is provided on the Germline WGS ASCN caller, see .
ROH Algorithm
The ROH algorithm runs on the small variant calls. The algorithm excludes variants with multiallelic sites, indels, complex variants, non-PASS filtered calls, and homozygous reference sites. The variant calls are then filtered further using a block list BED, and finally depth filtering is applied after the block list filter. The default value for the fraction of filtered calls is 0.2, which filters the calls with the highest 10% and lowest 10% in DP values. The algorithm then uses the resulting calls to find regions.
The ROH algorithm first finds seed regions that contain at least 50 consecutive homozygous SNV calls with no heterozygous SNV or gaps of 500,000 bases between the variants. The regions can be extended using a scoring system that functions as follows.
Score increases with every additional homozygous variant (0.025) and decreases with a large penalty (1-0.025) for every heterozygous SNV. This provides some tolerance of presence of heterozygous SNV in the region.
Each region expands on both ends until the regions reach the end of a chromosome, a gap of 500,000 bases between SNVs occurs, or the score becomes too low (0).
Overlapping regions are merged into a single region. Regions can be merged across gaps of 500,000 bases between SNVs if a single region would have been called from the beginning of the first region to the end of the second region without the gap. There is no maximum size for regions, but regions always end at chromosome boundaries.
ROH Options
--vc-enable-roh
Set to true to enable the ROH caller. The ROH caller is enabled by default for human autosomes only. Set to false to disable.
--vc-roh-blacklist-bed
If provided, the ROH caller ignores variants that are contained in any region in the block list BED file. DRAGEN distributes block list files for all popular human genomes and automatically selects a block list to match the genome in use, unless this option is used to select a file.
--vc-roh-enable-depth-filter Enable depth filter for ROH. The depth filter is enabled by default. Set to false to disable.
--vc-roh-min-seed-size The minimum number of consecutive homozygous SNPs to form a ROH (Default=50)
--vc-roh-max-gap-length The maximum gap length (bp) between two homozygous SNPs to be included in the same region (Default=500000)
--vc-roh-error-rate The rate of genotyping errors (Default=0.025)
ROH Output
The ROH caller produces an ROH output file named <output-file-prefix>.roh.bed in which each row represents one region of homozygosity. The BED file contains the following columns:
Chromosome Start End Score #Homozygous #Heterozygous
Score is a function of the number of homozygous and heterozygous variants, where each homozygous variant increases the score by 0.025, and each heterozygous variant reduces the score by 0.975.
Start and end positions are a 0-based, half-open interval.
#Homozygous is number of homozygous variants in the region.
#Heterozygous is number of heterozygous variants in the region.
The caller also produces a metrics file named<output-file-prefix>.roh_metrics.csv that lists the number of large
ROH and percentage of SNPs in large ROH (>3 MB).
The table below demonstrates how the PLINK options can be tuned to behave similarly to the DRAGEN ROH caller default settings (see column DRAGEN default). We observed that PLINK ROH calls (see column PLINK default) in default settings are more conservative compared to DRAGEN default settings. By default, PLINK reports ROH regions of size 1MB or larger (see PLINK option --homozyg-kb ) with at least 100 homozygous SNPs (see PLINK option --homozyg-snp) while DRAGEN ROH caller reports smaller regions with at least 50 homozygous SNPs (see DRAGEN ROH Algorithm section). In addition, PLINK by default allows for only 1 heterozygous SNP per scanning window (specified by PLINK option --homozyg-window-het) while DRAGEN uses a soft score threshold penalty without setting an upper bound on the allowed number of heterozygous SNPs (see DRAGEN ROH Algorithm section). The PLINK ROH calls are largely comparable to the DRAGEN ROH calls after relaxing the default PLINK settings, shown in column PLINK tuned. Prior to PLINK ROH calling, the input DRAGEN hard-filtered VCF files are filtered as per the instructions in DRAGEN ROH Algorithm section.
--homozyg-density
50
50
Minimum required density to call a ROH (1 SNP in 50 kb), can be increased to relax the per SNP density.
--homozyg-gap
1000
1000
3000
Maximal interval between two homozygous SNPs in a ROH (in kb)
--homozyg-kb
1000
500
All sizes reported
Minimal length of reported ROH (in kb)
--homozyg-snp
100
50
50
Minimal number of homozygous SNPs in the reported ROH
--homozyg-window-het
1
2
Soft score threshold (1-0.025) penalty for a het SNP and 0.025 gain for a hom SNP
Maximum number of heterozygous SNPs allowed in a scanning window
--homozyg-window-missing
5
5
Number of missing calls allowed in a scanning window
--homozyg-window-snp
50
50
Variants in a scanning window
--homozyg-window-threshold
0.05
0.05
For a SNP to be eligible for inclusion in a ROH, the hit rate/overlap of all scanning windows containing the SNP must be at least 0.05