Keynote Presentation: Closing the Gap: Solving Complex Medically Relevant Genes at Scale with Live Q&A

Comprehending the mechanism behind human diseases with an established heritable component represents the forefront of personalized medicine. Nevertheless, numerous medically important genes are inaccurately represented in short-read sequencing data analysis due to their complexity and repetitiveness or the so-called ‘dark regions’ of the human genome. The advent of PacBio as a long-read platform has provided new insights, yet HiFi whole-genome sequencing (WGS) cost remains frequently prohibitive. We introduce a targeted sequencing and analysis framework, Twist Alliance Dark Genes Panel (TADGP), designed to offer phased variants across 389 medically important yet complex autosomal genes. We highlight TADGP accuracy across eleven control samples and compare it to WGS. This demonstrates that TADGP achieves variant calling accuracy comparable to HiFi-WGS data, but at a fraction of the cost. Thus, enabling scalability and broad applicability for studying rare diseases or complementing previously sequenced samples to gain insights into these complex genes.

TADGP revealed several candidate variants across all cases and provided insight into LPA diversity when tested on samples from rare disease and cardiovascular disease cohorts. In both cohorts, we identified novel variants affecting individual disease-associated genes (e.g., IKZF1, KCNE1). Nevertheless, the annotation of the variants across these 389 medically important genes remains challenging due to their underrepresentation in ClinVar and gnomAD. Consequently, we also offer an annotation resource to enhance the evaluation and prioritization of these variants.

Overall, we can demonstrate that TADGP offers a cost-efficient and scalable approach to routinely assess the dark regions of the human genome with clinical relevance.

Learning Objectives:

1. Review the intricacies of medical complex genes, including the factors that contribute to their complexity.

2. Evaluate the advantages and limitations of sequencing methods and technologies in studying these genes.

3. Summarize the latest methods and algorithms utilized to tackle the challenges of analyzing complex genes, focusing on state-of-the-art approaches in the field.