A comprehensive, genomic variation graph offers an intuitive view of how human genomes vary
Biomedical Computation Review | By Katharine Miller
Humans share 99.5 percent of their DNA sequence, but that still leaves plenty of variation to go around. To get a handle on which variations contribute to health or disease, researchers typically compare individuals’ genomes to a single “reference” genome that represents an assemblage of very high quality human genome sequences.
But now researchers are envisioning a better way to think about reference genomes by building a genome graph that represents not just a single linear genome but also known variation. “The graph is this comprehensive representation of human variation that allows us to have a discourse that computers can understand about all of the different ways that humans vary,” says Benedict Paten, PhD, associated research scientist at the Big Data and Translational Genomics (BDTG) BD2K Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.