Benchmarking the Human Leukocyte Antigen Typing Performance of Three Assays and Seven Next-Generation Sequencing-Based Algorithms

Abstract

With the great progress made recently in next generation sequencing (NGS) technology, sequencing accuracy and throughput have increased, while the cost for data has decreased. Various human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing algorithms and assays have been developed and have begun to be used in clinical practice. In this study, we compared the HLA typing performance of three HLA assays and seven NGS-based HLA algorithms and assessed the impact of sequencing depth and length on HLA typing accuracy based on 24 benchmarked samples. The algorithms HISAT-genotype and HLA-HD showed the highest accuracy at both the first field and the second field resolution, followed by HLAscan. Our internal capture-based HLA assay showed comparable performance with whole exome sequencing (WES). We found that the minimal depth was 100X for HISAT-genotype and HLA-HD to obtain more than 90% accuracy at the third field level. The top three algorithms were quite robust to the change of read length. Thus, we recommend using HISAT-genotype and HLA-HD for NGS-based HLA genotyping because of their higher accuracy and robustness to read length. We propose that a minimal sequence depth for obtaining more than 90% HLA typing accuracy at the third field level is 100X. Besides, targeting capture-based NGS HLA typing may be more suitable than WES in clinical practice due to its lower sequencing cost and higher HLA sequencing depth.