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[Report] DNA damage is a pervasive cause of sequencing errors, directly confounding variant identification

ScienceNOW - Fetched: February 16th, 2017, 5:00pm UTC

Mutations in somatic cells generate a heterogeneous genomic population and may result in serious medical conditions. Although cancer is typically associated with somatic variations, advances in DNA sequencing indicate that cell-specific variants affect a number of phenotypes and pathologies. Here, we show that mutagenic damage accounts for the majority of the erroneous identification of variants with low to moderate (1 to 5%) frequency. More important, we found signatures of damage in most sequencing data sets in widely used resources, including the 1000 Genomes Project and The Cancer Genome Atlas, establishing damage as a pervasive cause of sequencing errors. The extent of this damage directly confounds the determination of somatic variants in these data sets. Authors: Lixin Chen, Pingfang Liu, Thomas C. Evans, Laurence M. Ettwiller

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