Patterns of genic intolerance of rare copy number variation in 59,898 human exomes

Douglas M Ruderfer, Tymor Hamamsy, Monkol Lek, Konrad J Karczewski, David Kavanagh, Kaitlin E Samocha, Mark J Daly, Daniel G MacArthur, Menachem Fromer, Shaun M Purcell
2016 Nature Genetics  
Copy number variation (CNV) impacting protein-coding genes contributes significantly to human diversity and disease. Here we characterized the rates and properties of rare genic CNV (<0.5% frequency) in exome-sequencing data from nearly 60,000 individuals in the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC). On average, individuals possessed 0.81 deleted and 1.75 duplicated genes, and most (70%) carried at least one rare genic CNV. For every gene, we empirically estimated an index of relative intolerance
more » ... to CNVs that demonstrated moderate correlation with measures of genic constraint based on single-nucleotide variation (SNV) and was independently correlated with measures of evolutionary conservation. For individuals with schizophrenia, genes impacted by CNVs were more intolerant than in controls. ExAC CNV data constitutes a critical component of an integrated database spanning the spectrum of human genetic variation, aiding the interpretation of personal genomes as well as population-based disease studies.
doi:10.1038/ng.3638 pmid:27533299 pmcid:PMC5042837 fatcat:fxalnidkujejnbgssezf3vz3qy