Patent Application: US-93774004-A

Abstract:
a method for obtaining a candidate nucleotide sequence s indicative of a sequence of a target polynucleotide molecule that produces a hybridization signal i }) upon incubation with a polynucleotide } for each polynucleotide } in a set e of polynucleotides . for each polynucleotide } in the set e of polynucleotides , a probability p 0 }) of the hybridization signal i }) when the sequence } is not complementary to a subsequence of t and a probability p 1 }) of the hybridization signal when the sequence } is complementary to a subsequence of t are obtained ; so as to obtain a probabilistic spectrum of t . a score is then assigned to each of a plurality of candidate nucleotide sequences that is being based upon the probabilistic spectrum and upon a reference nucleotide sequence h . a candidate nucleotide sequence having an essentially maximal score is selected and one or more low confidence intervals and one or more reliable intervals in the selected candidate nucleotide sequence are identified . for each low confidence interval detected in the selected candidate nucleotide sequence , a score is assigned to each of a plurality of candidate nucleotide sequences of the low confidence region , where the score is based upon a probabilistic spectrum obtained by filtering from the ps signals the signals present in the reliable regions ; and upon an interval of the reference nucleotide sequence h homologous with the low confidence interval . a candidate nucleotide sequence having an essentially maximal score is then selected . a revised candidate sequence s ′ is then obtained indicative of the sequence of the target polynucleotide molecule t by substituting the sequence of the low confidence region in the candidate sequence s with the selected candidate sequence .

Description:
target samples included 10 synthetic double stranded dna molecules of length 25 - 35 bp and 32 pcr amplicons of length 100 - 140 bp ( see tables 1 and 2 ). table 2 ex - peri - target dataset ment type 1 locus from2 to3 mutant3 1 1 a agt4 4078 4177 w 2 a agt 4078 4177 atg281acg 3 a agt 4078 4177 w 4 a agt 4078 4177 atg281acg 5 a agt 4078 4177 w 6 a agt 4078 4177 atg281acg 2 1 a cftr5 107766 107863 gga542tga 2 a cftr 107782 107891 ggt551g [ g / a ] t 3 a cftr 107782 107891 cga553tga 4 a cftr 107810 107917 agg560acg 5 s cftr 107803 107827 gga542tga 6 s cftr 107803 107827 w 7 s cftr 107858 107881 w 3 1 a cftr 107766 107863 gga542tga 2 a cftr 107782 107891 ggt551g [ g / a ] t 3 a cftr 107782 107891 cga553tga 4 a cftr 107810 107917 agg560acg 5 s cftr 107834 107856 w 6 s cftr 107834 107856 ggt551gat + cga553tga 7 s cftr 107858 107881 agg560acg 4 1 a cftr 107782 107891 gga542tga 2 a cftr 107782 107891 ggt551g [ g / a ] t 3 a cftr 107825 107914 cga553tga 4 a cftr 107825 107914 agg560acg 5 a cftr 107795 107893 cga553tga 6 a cftr 107766 107863 w 7 a cftr 107810 107917 ggt551g [ g / a ] t 8 a cftr 107766 107863 gga542tga 5 1 a cftr 107766 107863 gga542tga 2 a cftr 107766 107863 w 3 a cftr 107782 107891 ggt551g [ g / a ] t 4 a cftr 107782 107891 w 5 a cftr 107825 107914 cga553tga 6 a cftr 107825 107914 w 7 a cftr 107810 107917 agg560acg 8 a cftr 107810 107917 w 1 s ch 186 44 78 base 19 a → g 2 s ch 18 44 78 w 3 a ch 18 1 109 base 62 a → g 4 a ch 18 1 109 w 5 s cftr 107803 107827 w 6 s cftr 107803 107827 gga542tga 2 offset ( bp ) from translation start site ( coding sequences ) or from segment start ( non coding ). 3 either the wildtype ( w ) or a mutant , which is denoted by the original codon , codon number and new codon ( coding sequences ) or bp number with base change ( non coding ). samples that are heterozygous for a mutation are denoted by , e . g . [ a / g ]. 4 genomic sequence at positions 769274 . . . 780916 of gi : 27477742 . 5 genomic sequence at positions 42296576 . . . 42485274 of gi : 22050628 . 6 genomic sequence at positions 136976 . . . 137084 of gi : 18677476 . the spectra of the targets in this embodiment were obtained using polymerase signaling assay ( psa ) ( liu et al ., 2001 ; head et a ., 2001 ; head et al ., 2002 ). psa uses a glass slide , onto which probes are spotted in an arrayed fashion . plates were used having 192 spots each , where 16 spots are used as controls , and 176 spots each contain a unique 5 - base probing sequence , representing 5 - mers and sequence variations specifically related to the target sequence being tested . used for analysis of agt exon 2 and cftr exon 11 , these experiments simplify the approach from the true “ universal array ” of 5 - mers . a complete universal array , which may be used for analysis of any arbitrary sequence , has a unique 5 - base probe for each of the 4 5 = 1024 possible pentanucleotide combinations . these larger arrays were constructed by using several sub - arrays . the probe - specific nucleotide combinations were designed to perfectly match every possible 5 - mer segment along a target . exact details of this assay are described for example in liu et al ., 2001 ; head et a ., 2001 ; head et al ., 2002 , incorporated herein by reference . a series of blind tests were performed , in which the target sequence was unknown . one set of assays comprised simple genotyping tests , where the target sequence was either the wildtype or a single - nucleotide mutant thereof . other assays were re - sequencing tests , wherein the target could have been any variant of the known reference sequence . partial , tiling arrays were constructed . some of these arrays consisted of probes that tile variants of exon 2 of angiotensinogen , while others tile exon 11 of cftr . universal arrays were also constructed and tested complete . arrays were used arrays of 5 - mer probes , for which only 1024 different oligonucleotides are needed . see table 1 for the list of arrays used . various target molecules were re - sequenced ( see table 2 ). to obtain as much specificity as possible from these short probes , the psa protocol was applied ( see methods ). the image , a confocal fluorescence scan , of one such universal array is presented in fig1 . arrayed psa reactions produce datasets of raw fluorescent signals . when reconstructing a target sequence using spectrum alignment , the quantity of interest for each probe is the likelihood of a perfect match . more precisely , given the raw signal s ({ right arrow over ( x )}) for a probe x , one needs to compute the probabilities p 1 ( x )= prob ( s ( x )| x is perfectly matched by the target ) and p 0 ( x )= prob ( s ( x )| x is not perfectly matched by the target ). although psa provides cleaner signals than hybridization , the signals may still be very noisy . the observed noise might be due either to stochastic effects , causing variation in replicate observations of the same intensity , or to hidden variables that distinguish between signals . as shown below , both factors contribute to the signal distribution , and knowledge of some hidden variables , such as individual probe differences can be exploited , to improve signal analysis . overall distributions of signals are presented in fig2 . these distributions , though obviously different , have a broad range of overlap . consequently , a simple threshold value cannot effectively distinguish between matched probes and unmatched ones . furthermore , even if we use the probabilities in fig2 , for most of the signal range , the matched and unmatched probabilities are of the same order of magnitude . thus the log - likelihood term log [ p 1 ( x )/ p 0 ( x )] contributed by most probes is around zero , rendering the model statistically weak . the weak separation of the p 0 and p 1 distributions can have two causes : either the individual per - probe distributions are separated weakly for most probes , or they are separated , and their superposition causes the weak separation . fortunately , as exemplified by fig3 , the latter case is in effect . for example , t - rich probes produce very high signals , due to the poly - a capture probes used in psa ( see methods ). therefore , negative signals for such probes would be deemed positive according to the overall signal distribution , which is a mixture of many different per - probe distributions ( see fig2 ). this suggests empirically estimating p 0 and p 1 on a per probe basis . for each probe x , for each signal level s , we estimate the probability of observing a signal s ( x ) under the assumption of a perfect match in the target sequence . we assume such signals are normally distributed , with a probe - specific mean and variance , providing the distribution of p 1 ( x ). the distribution of p 0 ( x ) is analogously estimated . two scenarios were studied and tested . in one embodiment , each of the two distributions p 0 and p 1 is estimated by assuming that the two distributions are the same for all probes . this method is referred to herein as probe - independent training . in another embodiment that may be used in cases in which several arrays were assayed using the same protocol , but with different target molecules , individual signal distributions for each probe are estimated under an approximate assumption that these arrays are replicates of the same experiment . this embodiment method is referred to herein as per - probe training . in probe - independent training , in the absence of any prior information on the signal distributions , the following approximation may be used . many random targets are generated in simulation which are variants of the reference sequence , and statistics are collected on the signal distributions of matched and unmatched probes . in this manner , the statistical properties of the actual target sequence used in the assay is modeled , without having any further information about the actual biochemical outcome of known target variants . ( see methods ). in per - probe training , several arrays are used that were assayed using a similar reference , but with different mutations . this is the case , for example , for each individual dataset in table 1 , which used several arrays . this is also the case for all the datasets of the cftr arrays that together constitute a much richer set . thus , a number of experiments with extensive perfect match data are available . in order to resolve the target in a specific array , each probe is trained using all other arrays with match / mismatch for the current probe . the matched / unmatched signal levels are pooled for each probe from all arrays and obtain a richer distribution . when that distribution is not based on sufficiently many probe occurrences , that distribution may be enriched by that of another , similar probe ( see methods ). as samples accumulate , richer and richer training sets can be built and exploited this way , so that statistical confidence of any single experiment increases . the two training methods present a tradeoff : probe - independent training uses a rich , yet coarse , set of observations , and forms a distribution that may be not representative of the specific probe . the per - probe method uses a finer set of observations , which may be too small a sample , and thus overfit the estimated distribution . we also consider a similar tradeoff with respect to the experiments used to learn the per - probe distribution : we compare results of analysis based on learning this distribution from the current dataset only , to learning based on all datasets , or on all other datasets except the current one . fig4 presents a comparison of the results obtained by each of the training methods . the function log [ p 1 ( x )/ p 0 ( x )] was used as the per nucleotide scoring function . a threshold value of 3 was used to distinguish between low confidence intervals and reliable intervals . per - probe analysis based on all other arrays is superior to probe - independent analysis based on the current dataset only . in per - probe methods , there is a tradeoff between training which is based only on the same dataset and training on all datasets : the more refined , but sparser training per dataset makes more false calls at known snp sites , but reports less spurious false positives due to overfitting . the estimated probabilities serve as input to the spectrum alignment computational engine . table 3 presents results for blind tests of genotyping and for re - sequencing tests . for angiotensinogen exon 2 , targets were either wildtype or mutated for a specific polymorphism . the algorithm was not calibrated beforehand with any prior information regarding the identity of this polymorphic site , i . e ., the reference sequence model was considered to have an equal likelihood to contain a mutation at any point along the target sequence . the genotype call on this site was correct for 6 out of 6 samples , and no spurious calls were made ( although permitted by the algorithm ). analysis for arrays in this dataset was carried out using probe - independent training . although each of the 5 - mer probes may not necessarily give an entirely specific assay signal , their joint analysis using the spectrum alignment algorithm ( pe &# 39 ; er et al ., 2002 ) utilizes all the statistical information available to produce a strong , combined signal . fig5 presents results for the cftr exon 11 . for re - sequencing this target ( with either partial or universal arrays ), we used as reference not only the genomic sequence , but also known mutations from the human genome mutation database ( www . hgmd . org ). all together , in 30 arrays , 2 . 6 kb of dna was re - sequenced . out of 64 known polymorphisms , 60 . 5 ( see fig4 ) were correctly typed , and two additional spurious mutations were falsely detected . this true - positive rate of 95 % is to be contrasted with the 30 % error rate introduced by pentamer biochemistry ( fig2 ). observe that this analysis was carried out without any attempt to detect heterozygocity . while genotyping does require the detection of heterozygotes ( see discussion ). a first , simple approach to test the feasibility of our methodology was employed , which ignored heterozygocity , and therefore technically counted heterozygotes as errors . out of the 56 homozygotes , only one error occurred . a non - coding region on chromosome 18 was also re - sequenced by universal arrays ( dataset 6 , arrays 1 - 4 ). for this target sequence we had no prior knowledge of the mutant sites . for this segment we missed one of the mutations in four re - sequenced targets of total length of 300 bp . both cftr targets assayed with universal arrays ( dataset 6 , arrays 5 and 6 ) were successfully resequenced . although per - probe signal effects by per - probe training has been accounted for , the major source of remaining error appears to be systematic bias , rather than stochastic effects between replicates : most of the failed genotypes involve the ggt551g [ g / a ] t mutation . thus , apparently , averaging many experiments will not be helpful in eliminating such errors , but further understanding and modeling of the causes of such systematic bias may solve the problem . the spectrum alignment algorithm was implemented on both windows and unix platforms . the implementation incorporates a refined analysis of heterozygote samples , although the results presented were analyzed without this feature . the heterozygotes analysis would obviously need to be added for full functionality . in addition , a visualization tool was implemented , called snp - o - gram , for presentation of re - sequencing results . this windows application displays the reference and re - sequenced target , along with plots that indicate the likelihood of each basecall , similar to standard traces of gel - based sequencing machines . fig6 displays the snp - o - gram of two re - sequenced targets . the following references are considered relevant to an understanding of the inventive subject matter , and their inclusion for such purpose is not an admission that such documents are material to patentability of the claimed subject matter , nor an admission that such documents are prior art . documents considered material to patentability will be separately identified by information disclosure statement . ahrendt , s . a ., halachmi , s ., chow , j . t ., wu , l ., halachmi , n ., yang , s . c ., wehage , s ., jen , j . and sidransky , d . 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