Comparison of the copy-neutral loss of heterozygosity identified from whole-exome sequencing data using three different tools

Abstract

Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) is a genomic aberration. In some cases, LOH can be generated without changing the copy number, which is called copy-neutral LOH (CN-LOH). CN-LOH frequently occurs in various human diseases, including cancer. However, the biological and clinical implications of CN-LOH for human diseases have not been well studied. In this study, we compared the performance of CN-LOH determination using three commonly used tools. For an objective comparison, we analyzed CN-LOH profiles from single-nucleotide polymorphism array data from 10 colon adenocarcinoma patients, which were used as the reference for comparison with the CN-LOHs obtained through whole-exome sequencing (WES) data of the same patients using three different analysis tools (FACETS, Nexus, and Sequenza). The majority of the CN-LOHs identified from the WES data were consistent with the reference data. However, some of the CN-LOHs identified from the WES data were not consistent between the three tools, and the consistency with the reference CN-LOH profile was also different. The Jaccard index of the CN-LOHs using FACETS (0.84 ± 0.29; mean value, 0.73) was significantly higher than that of Nexus (0.55 ± 0.29; mean value, 0.50; p = 0.02) or Sequenza (0 ± 0.41; mean value, 0.34; p = 0.04). FACETS showed the highest area under the curve value. Taken together, of the three CN-LOH analysis tools, FACETS showed the best performance in identifying CN-LOHs from The Cancer Genome Atlas colon adenocarcinoma WES data. Our results will be helpful in exploring the biological or clinical implications of CN-LOH for human diseases.