TopHap: Rapid inference of key phylogenetic structures from common haplotypes in large genome collections with limited diversity

MOTIVATION: Building reliable phylogenies from very large collections of sequences with a limited number of phylogenetically informative sites is challenging because sequencing errors and recurrent/backward mutations interfere with the phylogenetic signal, confounding true evolutionary relationships. Massive global efforts of sequencing genomes and reconstructing the phylogeny of SARS-CoV-2 strains exemplify these difficulties since there are only hundreds of phylogenetically informative sites and millions of genomes. For such datasets, we set out to develop a method for building the phylogenetic tree of genomic haplotypes consisting of positions harboring common variants to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for more accurate phylogenetic inference of resolvable phylogenetic features. RESULTS: We present the TopHap approach that determines spatiotemporally common haplotypes of common variants and builds their phylogeny at a fraction of the computational time of traditional methods. To assess topological robustness, we develop a bootstrap resampling strategy that resamples genomes spatiotemporally. The application of TopHap to build a phylogeny of 68,057 genomes (68KG) produced an evolutionary tree of major SARS-CoV-2 haplotypes. This phylogeny is concordant with the mutation tree inferred using the co-occurrence pattern of mutations and recovers key phylogenetic relationships from more traditional analyses. We also evaluated alternative roots of the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny and found that the earliest sampled genomes in 2019 likely evolved by four mutations of the most recent common ancestor of all SARS-CoV-2 genomes. An application of TopHap to more than 1 million genomes reconstructed the most comprehensive evolutionary relationships of major variants, which confirmed the 68KG phylogeny and provided evolutionary origins of major variants of concern.