Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Variation of sequence copy number (CN) between individuals can be associated with phenotypical differences. Consequently, CN calling is an important step for disease association and identification, as well as for genome assembly validation. Traditionally, CN calling is done by mapping sequencing reads to a linear reference genome and estimating the CN from the observed read depth. This approach, however, is significantly hampered by sequences and rearrangements not present in a linear reference genome; at the same time simple CN prediction for individual graph nodes does not make use of the graph topology and can lead to inconsistent results. To address these issues, we propose Floco, a method for CN calling with respect to a genome graph using a network flow formulation. Given a graph and alignments against that graph, we calculate raw CN probabilities for every graph node based on the Negative Binomial distribution and the base pair coverage across the node, and then use integer linear programming to compute the CN flow through the whole graph. We tested this approach on 15 aligned datasets, involving three different graphs, as well as HiFi and ONT sequencing reads and linear assemblies split into reads. These results demonstrate that the addition of the network flow formulation increases the accuracy of CN predictions by up to 43% when compared with read depth based estimation alone. Additionally, we observed that concordance between predictions from the three different sequence sources was able to reach 93.2%. Floco fills a gap in CN calling tools specifically designed for genome graphs.
Authors: Hugo Magalhães, Jonas Weber, Gunnar W. Klau, Tobias Marschall, Timofey Prodanov
Institution: Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4416722745