Imputation and polygenic score performances of human genotyping arrays in diverse populations

Abstract

Regardless of the overwhelming use of next-generation sequencing technologies, microarray-based genotyping combined with the imputation of untyped variants remains a cost-effective means to interrogate genetic variations across the human genome. This technology is widely used in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) at bio-bank scales, and more recently, in polygenic score (PGS) analysis to predict and to stratify disease risk. Over the last decade, human genotyping arrays have undergone a tremendous growth in both number, and content making a comprehensive evaluation of their performances became more important. Here, we performed a comprehensive performance assessment for 23 available human genotyping arrays in 6 ancestry groups using diverse public, and in-house datasets. The analyses focus on performance estimation of derived imputation (in terms of accuracy and coverage) and PGS (in term of concordance to PGS estimated from whole genome sequencing data) in three different traits and diseases. We found that the arrays with a higher number of SNPs are not necessarily the ones with higher imputation performance, but the arrays that are well-optimized for the targeted population could provide very good imputation performance. In addition, PGS estimated by imputed SNP array data is highly correlated to PGS estimated by whole genome sequencing data in most of cases. When optimal arrays are used, the correlations of key PGS metrics between two types of data can be higher than 0.97, but interestingly, arrays with high density can result in lower PGS performance. Our results suggest the importance of properly selecting a suitable genotyping array for PGS applications. Finally, we developed a web tool that provide interactive analyses of tag SNP contents and imputation performance based on population and genomic regions of interest. This study would act as a practical guide for researchers to design their genotyping arrays-based studies. The tool is available at: https://genome.vinbigdata.org/tools/saa/