Hmmm. My data does not come from a "regular vcf" file, but from a standard GWAS-microarray workflow with PLINK. How would you proceed? --> "Force" it?
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plink2 reorder alleles by fasta reference
Hello,
I have a plink 2.0 file ("Ref" is always the major allele) and want to reorder its ref and alt alleles by a fasta reference. For this I use the --ref-from-fa command. However, the following error occurs:
Error: --ref-from-fa wants to change reference allele assignment at X:2700157,but it's marked `as 'known'. Add the 'force' modifier to force this change`
What does marked as "known" mean? How should I go on?
Best,
Andreas
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1 answer
plink 2.0 marks a reference allele as "provisional" instead of "known" when it comes from a plink 1 .bed file, or a VCF directly generated by plink from such a .bed file. Some of these reference alleles are expected to be wrong.
However, when a reference allele comes from a regular VCF file, it's expected to be correct; that's why an additional --ref-from-fa modifier is required to change it.
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Yes, if you know the supposed REF alleles are really just major alleles, that's what "force" is for.
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If I do so, I get the following report:
--ref-from-fa force: 4685 variants changed, 1 validated.
In total I only have 4686 variants...
The fasta reference which I use is from here: ftp://ftp.1000genomes.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/ftp/technical/reference/human_g1k_v37.fasta.gz
And here is my command:
plink2 --pfile file --ref-from_fasta --fa reference.fasta --make-pgen --out output
What could be wrong here?
Thanks for your help!
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Perhaps your original dataset had "backwards" alleles (with REF usually A1 instead of A2) for some reason, while still being correctly encoded. You can sanity-check this by running --freq on your updated dataset: if the alternate allele frequencies are usually low, you're probably fine.
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