PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Hubert Pausch AU - Iona M MacLeod AU - Ruedi Fries AU - Reiner Emmerling AU - Phil J Bowman AU - Hans D Daetwyler AU - Michael E Goddard TI - Evaluation of the accuracy of imputed sequence variants and their utility for causal variant detection in cattle AID - 10.1101/085399 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 085399 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/14/085399.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/14/085399.full AB - Background The availability of dense genotypes and whole-genome sequence variants from various sources offers the opportunity to compile large data sets consisting of tens of thousands of individuals with genotypes at millions of polymorphic sites that may enhance the power of genomic analyses. The imputation of missing genotypes ensures that all individuals have genotypes for a shared set of variants.Results We evaluated the accuracy of imputation from dense genotypes to whole-genome sequence variants in 249 Fleckvieh and 450 Holstein cattle using Minimac and FImpute. The sequence variants of a subset of the animals were reduced to the variants that were included in the Illumina BovineHD genotyping array and subsequently inferred in silico using either within-or multi-breed reference populations. The accuracy of imputation varied considerably across chromosomes and dropped at regions where the bovine genome contains segmental duplications. Depending on the imputation strategy, the correlation between imputed and true genotypes ranged from 0.898 to 0.952. The accuracy of imputation was higher with Minimac than FImpute particularly for rare alleles. Considering a multi-breed reference population increased the accuracy of imputation, particularly when FImpute was used to infer genotypes. When the sequence variants were imputed using Minimac, the true genotypes were more correlated to predicted allele dosages than best-guess genotypes. The computing costs to impute 23,256,743 sequence variants in 6958 animals were ten-fold higher with Minimac than FImpute. Association studies with imputed sequence variants revealed seven quantitative trait loci (QTL) for milk fat percentage. Two causal mutations in the DGAT1 and GHR genes were the most significantly associated variants at two QTL on chromosomes 14 and 20 when Minimac was used to infer genotypes.Conclusions The population-based imputation of millions of sequence variants in large cohorts is computationally feasible and provides accurate genotypes. The accuracy of imputation is low at regions where the genome contains large structural variants. Using a reference population that includes individuals from many breeds increases the accuracy of imputation particularly at low-frequency variants. Considering allele dosages rather than best-guess genotypes as explanatory variables is advantageous to detect causal mutations in association studies with imputed sequence variants.