Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 27, 2026

Detecting Somatic Genetic Alterations in Tumor Specimens by Exon Capture and Massively Parallel Sequencing
Published on: October 18, 2013
H3M2: detection of runs of homozygosity from whole-exome sequencing data
Alberto Magi1, Lorenzo Tattini1, Flavia Palombo1
1Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, University of Florence, Florence 50019, Medical Genetics Unit, Polyclinic Sant'Orsola-Malpighi, Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna 40138, Diagnostic Genetic Unit, Careggi Hospital, Florence 50019, Italy and Language and Genetics Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6525 EN, The Netherlands.
Motivation:
Runs of homozygosity (ROH) are sizable chromosomal stretches of homozygous genotypes, ranging in length from tens of kilobases to megabases. ROHs can be relevant for population and medical genetics, playing a role in predisposition to both rare and common disorders. ROHs are commonly detected by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarrays, but attempts have been made to use whole-exome sequencing (WES) data. Currently available methods developed for the analysis of uniformly spaced SNP-array maps do not fit easily to the analysis of the sparse and non-uniform distribution of the WES target design.
Results:
To meet the need of an approach specifically tailored to WES data, we developed [Formula: see text], an original algorithm based on heterogeneous hidden Markov model that incorporates inter-marker distances to detect ROH from WES data. We evaluated the performance of [Formula: see text] to correctly identify ROHs on synthetic chromosomes and examined its accuracy in detecting ROHs of different length (short, medium and long) from real 1000 genomes project data. [Formula: see text] turned out to be more accurate than GERMLINE and PLINK, two state-of-the-art algorithms, especially in the detection of short and medium ROHs.
Availability And Implementation:
[Formula: see text] is a collection of bash, R and Fortran scripts and codes and is freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/h3m2/.
Contact:
albertomagi@gmail.com
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Related Concept Videos
Genome-wide Association Studies-GWAS
GWAS does not require the identification of the target gene involved in...
Sanger Sequencing
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...
Next-generation Sequencing
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features....
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
RNA-seq
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while...

