A impressive finding from recent large-scale sequencing attempts is that the vast majority of variants in the human being genome are rare and found within solitary populations or lineages. enriched for variants likely to be disease causing and here we assay the ability of the 1st commercially PGF available rare exome variant array (the Illumina Infinium HumanExome BeadChip) to also tag additional potentially damaging variants not molecularly assayed. Using full sequence data from chromosome 22 from your phase I 1000 Genomes Project we evaluate three methods for imputation (BEAGLE MaCH-Admix and SHAPEIT2/IMPUTE2) with the rare exome variant array under assorted study panel sizes reference panel sizes and LD constructions via population variations. We find that imputation is definitely more accurate across both the genome and exome for common variant arrays than the next generation array for those allele frequencies including rare alleles. We also find that imputation is the least accurate in African populations and accuracy is definitely considerably improved for rare variants when the same populace is included in the reference panel. Depending on the goals of GWAS researchers our results will aid budget decisions by helping determine whether money is best spent sequencing the genomes of smaller sample sizes genotyping larger sample sizes with rare and/or common variant arrays and imputing SNPs or some combination of the two. 1 Introduction The ability to measure human genetic variation on a genome-scale reliably and inexpensively in research settings has fueled and shaped the movement toward personalized medicine in health care. A prominent strategy for discovering genetic variants underlying disease susceptibility is usually through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in which a subset of genetic variation is usually observed or inferred via linkage AZD 2932 disequilibrium (LD) and correlated with disease state. GWAS have been successful in identifying thousands of reproducible associations with complex disease which have had some utility in clinical practice1 2 However most variants identified in GWAS with genotyping arrays are of small effect and fail to explain a large portion of genetic variation even when the disease is usually estimated to be highly heritable3. Population genetics and neutral theory suggest that common variation might be less important than rare variation in these cases because selective pressure has had more time to eliminate deleterious alleles. With the advent of next generation sequencing technology large consortia seeking to identify nonsynonymous coding changes have emerged. A salient result of these AZD 2932 large-scale projects is usually that the vast majority of genetic variation is usually rare and exhibits little sharing among diverged populations4-6. The sequencing costs for an exome still outweigh those of genotyping arrays however and large sample sizes are required to detect rare variants. This creates a budget dilemma for GWAS researchers trying to explain the genetic basis of disease regarding the number of individuals they AZD 2932 can afford to study with sequencing versus genotyping methods. As a consequence of these findings researchers have designed a next generation genotyping array that enriches for nonsynonymous rare coding variants. More than 15 labs with exome sequencing data from ~12 0 individuals contributed to the ascertainment of SNPs to AZD 2932 include in the first rare variant array. The current design of the first publicly available next generation array the Illumina Infinium HumanExome BeadChip consists of only ~250 0 variants a fraction of the sites that most common variant arrays currently assay. The vast majority of sites are rare coding variants; the remaining sites include randomly selected synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) Native American and African ancestry useful markers GWAS tag SNPs HLA tags common scaffold SNPs and ~2 0 variants from other functional classes. A potential way to bolster the number of sites is usually through statistical inference of variants not molecularly assayed around the genotyping array through phasing and imputation guided by publicly available reference panels4 7 8 Phasing and imputation methods rely on the correlated inheritance between neighboring alleles AZD 2932 or linkage disequilibrium (LD) between assayed AZD 2932 alleles. LD is usually substantially reduced between variants around the rare exome array overall however because the number of scaffold SNPs is usually substantially reduced compared to other GWAS arrays (5 286 SNPs total compared to hundreds of thousands on common variant arrays). Admixture mapping an approach often used when ancestry confounds GWAS associations also relies heavily on a dense scaffold.