HAHap: a read-based haplotyping method using hierarchical assembly

Abstract

Background The need for read-based phasing arises with advances in sequencing technologies. The minimum error correction (MEC) approach is the primary trend to resolve haplotypes by reducing conflicts in a single nucleotide polymorphism-fragment matrix. However, it is frequently observed that the solution with the optimal MEC might not be the real haplotypes, due to the fact that MEC methods consider all positions together and sometimes the conflicts in noisy regions might mislead the selection of corrections. To tackle this problem, we present a hierarchical assembly-based method designed to progressively resolve local conflicts. Results This study presents HAHap, a new phasing algorithm based on hierarchical assembly. HAHap leverages high-confident variant pairs to build haplotypes progressively. The phasing results by HAHap on both real and simulated data, compared to other MEC-based methods, revealed better phasing error rates for constructing haplotypes using short reads from whole-genome sequencing. We compared the number of error corrections (ECs) on real data with other methods, and it reveals the ability of HAHap to predict haplotypes with a lower number of ECs. We also used simulated data to investigate the behavior of HAHap under different sequencing conditions, highlighting the applicability of HAHap in certain situations.