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Read depths from 1000G exome sequencing are almost all zero.

Hi Biostars community,

I recently built a script around the commands from this question in order to obtain read depth data for about 22,000 small regions (<=50bp each). The BAM file was from whole-exome NGS at the 1000 Genomes Project:

ftp://ftp-trace.ncbi.nih.gov/1000genomes/ftp/technical/other_exome_alignments/HG00096/exome_alignment/HG00096.mapped.illumina.mosaik.GBR.exome.20111114.bam

To choose my 22,000ish regions, I used 1000 Genomes' list of pulldown targets, and I used liftover to convert them to hg18 coordinates because that's what they align reads to in this paper (see supplement). I looked only at chromosome 22. For any region larger than 50 bp, I split it up.

My question: why are there only 878 regions with nonzero read depth? Is that to be expected?

Thanks for your advice.

next-gen-sequencing

The paper you are citing is the "pilot" paper written six years ago. The more recent the phase1 paper. 1000g is using hg19/GRCh37 throughout right now.

Phase 3 paper is coming out. The data is up on the FTP though.

I switched to HG19 coordinates, but the problem persists. It would help to have a fast, well-tested method to obtain read-depth from BAM files. Currently, it takes me hours to process a single chromosome, and both of the existing APIs that I tried (Pysam and Pybedtools) either crashed my Python kernel or crashed my entire computer.

No need to use pysam/pybedtools. Just: samtools depth -b interval.bed -r 22 input.bam.

In fact, switching to HG19 coordinates has resolved the problem. And thank you for the advice on samtools depth. I will try that.

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