Homozygosity mapping provides supporting evidence of pathogenicity in recessive Mendelian disease

PURPOSE: One of the greatest challenges currently facing those studying Mendelian disease is identifying the pathogenic variant from the long list produced by a next-generation sequencing test. We investigate the predictive ability of homozygosity mapping for identifying the regions likely to contain the causative variant. METHODS: We use 179 homozygous pathogenic variants from three independent cohorts to investigate the predictive power of homozygosity mapping. RESULTS: We demonstrate that homozygous pathogenic variants in our cohorts are disproportionately likely to be found within one of the largest regions of homozygosity: 80% of pathogenic variants are found in a homozygous region that is in the ten largest regions in a sample. The maximal predictive power is achieved in patients with <8% homozygosity and variants >3 Mb from a telomere; this gives an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.735 and results in 92% of the causative variants being in one of the ten largest homozygous regions. CONCLUSION: This predictive power can be used to prioritize the list of candidate variants in gene discovery studies. When classifying a homozygous variant the size and rank of the region of homozygosity in which the candidate variant is located can also be considered as supporting evidence for pathogenicity.