Reference genome assessment from a population scale perspective: an accurate profile of variability and noise.

Abstract Motivation Current plant and animal genomic studies are often based on newly assembled genomes that have not been properly consolidated. In this scenario, misassembled regions can easily lead to false-positive findings. Despite quality control scores are included within genotyping protocols, they are usually employed to evaluate individual sample quality rather than reference sequence reliability. We propose a statistical model that combines quality control scores across samples in order to detect incongruent patterns at every genomic region. Our model is inherently robust since common artifact signals are expected to be shared between independent samples over misassembled regions …