Instance-based error correction for short reads of disease-associated genes

BACKGROUND: Genomic reads from sequencing platforms contain random errors. Global correction algorithms have been developed, aiming to rectify all possible errors in the reads using generic genome-wide patterns. However, the non-uniform sequencing depths hinder the global approach to conduct effective error removal. As some genes may get under-corrected or over-corrected by the global approach, we conduct instance-based error correction for short reads of disease-associated genes or pathways. The paramount requirement is to ensure the relevant reads, instead of the whole genome, are error-free to provide significant benefits for single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) or variant calling studies on the specific genes. RESULTS: To rectify possible errors in the short reads of disease-associated genes, our novel idea is to exploit local sequence features and statistics directly related to these genes. Extensive experiments are conducted in comparison with state-of-the-art methods on both simulated and real datasets of lung cancer associated genes (including single-end and paired-end reads). The results demonstrated the superiority of our method with the best performance on precision, recall and gain rate, as well as on sequence assembly results (e.g., N50, the length of contig and contig quality). CONCLUSION: Instance-based strategy makes it possible to explore fine-grained patterns focusing on specific genes, providing high precision error correction and convincing gene sequence assembly. SNP case studies show that errors occurring at some traditional SNP areas can be accurately corrected, providing high precision and sensitivity for investigations on disease-causing point mutations.