Accurate and Efficient KIR Gene and Haplotype Inference From Genome Sequencing Reads With Novel K-mer Signatures

The killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptor (KIR) proteins evolve to fight viruses and mediate the body’s reaction to pregnancy. These roles provide selection pressure for variation at both the structural/haplotype and base/allele levels. At the same time, the genes have evolved relatively recently by tandem duplication and therefore exhibit very high sequence similarity over thousands of bases. These variation-homology patterns make it impossible to interpret KIR haplotypes from abundant short-read genome sequencing data at population scale using existing methods. Here, we developed an efficient computational approach for in silico KIR probe interpretation (KPI) to accurately interpret individual’s KIR genes and haplotype-pairs from KIR sequencing reads. We designed synthetic 25-base sequence probes by analyzing previously reported haplotype sequences, and we developed a bioinformatics pipeline to interpret the probes in the context of 16 KIR genes and 16 haplotype structures. We demonstrated its accuracy on a synthetic data set as well as a real whole genome sequences from 748 individuals from The Genome of the Netherlands (GoNL). The GoNL predictions were compared with predictions from SNP-based predictions. Our results show 100% accuracy rate for the synthetic tests and a 99.6% family-consistency rate in the GoNL tests. Agreement with the SNP-based calls on KIR genes ranges from 72%–100% with a mean of 92%; most differences occur in genes KIR2DS2, KIR2DL2, KIR2DS3, and KIR2DL5 where KPI predicts presence and the SNP-based interpretation predicts absence. Overall, the evidence suggests that KPI’s accuracy is 97% or greater for both KIR gene and haplotype-pair predictions, and the presence/absence genotyping leads to ambiguous haplotype-pair predictions with 16 reference KIR haplotype structures. KPI is free, open, and easily executable as a Nextflow workflow supported by a Docker environment at https://github.com/droeatumn/kpi.