Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Brief Communication
  • Published:

Pyrobayes: an improved base caller for SNP discovery in pyrosequences

Abstract

Previously reported applications of the 454 Life Sciences pyrosequencing technology have relied on deep sequence coverage for accurate polymorphism discovery because of frequent insertion and deletion sequence errors. Here we report a new base calling program, Pyrobayes, for pyrosequencing reads. Pyrobayes permits accurate single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) calling in resequencing applications, even in shallow read coverage, primarily because it produces more confident base calls than the native base calling program.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Comparison of the error profiles of Pyrobayes and the native 454 base caller.
Figure 2: Comparison of the base qualities assigned by Pyrobayes and the native 454 base caller.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Margulies, M. et al. Nature 437, 376–380 (2005).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Girard, A., Sachidanandam, R., Hannon, G.J. & Carmell, M.A. Nature 442, 199–202 (2006).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Thomas, R.K. et al. Nat. Med. 12, 852–855 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Velicer, G.J. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 8107–8112 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Hoskins, R.A. et al. Genome Res. 11, 1100–1113 (2001).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Marth, G.T. et al. Nat. Genet. 23, 452–456 (1999).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Quinlan, A.R. & Marth, G.T. Nat. Methods 4, 192 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Ewing, B. & Green, P. Genome Res. 8, 186–194 (1998).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Ewing, B., Hillier, L., Wendl, M.C. & Green, P. Genome Res. 8, 175–185 (1998).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Lander, E.S. & Waterman, M.S. Genomics 2, 231–239 (1988).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the US National Human Genome Research Institute (R01 HG003698) to G.T.M. We thank E. Mardis and the 454 production group at the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center for generating the sequence data used in this work, and A. Clark at Cornell University for providing access to the D. melanogaster reads.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.R.Q., software and algorithm development and data analysis; D.A.S., data fitting and parameter estimation for Bayesian data likelihoods; M.P.S., alignment algorithm development. A.R.Q. and G.T.M. designed the experiment and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gábor T Marth.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–5, Supplementary Methods (PDF 423 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Quinlan, A., Stewart, D., Strömberg, M. et al. Pyrobayes: an improved base caller for SNP discovery in pyrosequences. Nat Methods 5, 179–181 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1172

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1172

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing