TY - JOUR T1 - Reference-based phasing using the Haplotype Reference Consortium panel JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/052308 SP - 052308 AU - Po-Ru Loh AU - Petr Danecek AU - Pier Francesco Palamara AU - Christian Fuchsberger AU - Yakir A Reshef AU - Hilary K Finucane AU - Sebastian Schoenherr AU - Lukas Forer AU - Shane McCarthy AU - Goncalo R Abecasis AU - Richard Durbin AU - Alkes L Price Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/10/052308.abstract N2 - Haplotype phasing is a fundamental problem in medical and population genetics. Phasing is generally performed via statistical phasing within a genotyped cohort, an approach that can attain high accuracy in very large cohorts but attains lower accuracy in smaller cohorts. Here, we instead explore the paradigm of reference-based phasing. We introduce a new phasing algorithm that attains high accuracy across a broad range of cohort sizes by efficiently leveraging information from large external reference panels (such as the Haplotype Reference Consortium, HRC) using a new data structure based on the positional Burrows-Wheeler transform. Our method improves phasing accuracy by >2x compared to the best publicly available alternative for phasing small European-ancestry cohorts, and it attains a ≈20x speedup and ≈10% increase in accuracy compared to reference-based phasing using SHAPEIT2. Our method is freely available for reference-based phasing using the HRC panel via the Sanger Imputation Service and the Michigan Imputation Server. ER -