The role and challenges of exome sequencing in studies of human diseases

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have transformed the genetics study of human diseases; this is an era of unprecedented productivity. Exome sequencing, the targeted sequencing of the protein-coding portion of the human genome, has been shown to be a powerful and cost-effective method for detection of disease variants underlying Mendelian disorders. Increasing effort has been made in the interest of the identification of rare variants associated with complex traits in sequencing studies. Here we provided an overview of the application fields for exome sequencing in human diseases. We describe a general framework of computation and bioinformatics for handling sequencing data. We then demonstrate data quality and agreement between exome sequencing and exome microarray (chip) genotypes using data collected on the same set of subjects in a genetic study of panic disorder. Our results show that, in sequencing data, the data quality was generally higher for variants within the exonic target regions, compared to that outside the target regions, due to the target enrichment. We also compared genotype concordance for variant calls obtained by exome sequencing vs. exome genotyping microarrays. The overall consistency rate was >99.83% and the heterozygous consistency rate was >97.55%. The two platforms share a large amount of agreement over low frequency variants in the exonic regions, while exome sequencing provides much more information on variants not included on exome genotyping microarrays. The results demonstrate that exome sequencing data are of high quality and can be used to investigate the role of rare coding variants in human diseases.