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Updated: Jun 29, 2025

Detection of Copy Number Alterations Using Single Cell Sequencing
Published on: February 17, 2017
Detection of elusive DNA copy-number variations in hereditary disease and cancer through the use of noncoding and
Mathieu Quinodoz1, Karolina Kaminska2, Francesca Cancellieri2
1Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), Basel, Switzerland; Department of Ophthalmology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Abstract:
Copy-number variants (CNVs) play a substantial role in the molecular pathogenesis of hereditary disease and cancer, as well as in normal human interindividual variation. However, they are still rather difficult to identify in mainstream sequencing projects, especially involving exome sequencing, because they often occur in DNA regions that are not targeted for analysis. To overcome this problem, we developed OFF-PEAK, a user-friendly CNV detection tool that builds on a denoising approach and the use of "off-target" DNA reads, which are usually discarded by sequencing pipelines. We benchmarked OFF-PEAK on data from targeted sequencing of 96 cancer samples, as well as 130 exomes of individuals with inherited retinal disease from three different populations. For both sets of data, OFF-PEAK demonstrated excellent performance (>95% sensitivity and >80% specificity vs. experimental validation) in detecting CNVs from in silico data alone, indicating its immediate applicability to molecular diagnosis and genetic research.
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