RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Ethnically relevant consensus Korean reference genome towards personal reference genomes JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 070805 DO 10.1101/070805 A1 Yun Sung Cho A1 Hyunho Kim A1 Hak-Min Kim A1 Sungwoong Jho A1 JeHoon Jun A1 Yong Joo Lee A1 Kyun Shik Chae A1 Chang Geun Kim A1 Sangsoo Kim A1 Anders Eriksson A1 Jeremy S. Edwards A1 Semin Lee A1 Byung Chul Kim A1 Andrea Manica A1 George M. Church A1 Jong Bhak YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/06/070805.abstract AB Human genomes are routinely compared against a universal reference. However, this strategy could miss population-specific or personal genomic variations, which may be detected more efficiently using an ethnically-relevant and/or a personal reference. Here we report a hybrid assembly of Korean reference (KOREF) as a pilot case for constructing personal and ethnic references by combining sequencing and mapping methods. KOREF is also the first consensus variome reference, providing information on millions of variants from additional ethnically homogeneous personal genomes. We found that this ethnically-relevant consensus reference was beneficial for efficiently detecting variants. Systematic comparison of KOREF with previously established human assemblies showed the importance of assembly quality, suggesting the necessity of using new technologies to comprehensively map ethnic and personal genomic structure variations. In the era of large-scale population genome projects, the leveraging of ethnicity-specific genome assemblies as well as the human reference genome will accelerate mapping all human genome diversity.