Number of private variants/singletons in identical twins

Question

[TimK]

Hi,

I was wondering how many singletons/private variants there might be (on average) between identical twins (WGS). Any suggestions?

Cheers, Tim

Answer 1

[WouterDeCoster]

There will be a few, but these might also be sequencing artefacts. You never know until you validate. If you want to play around with real twin data (generated by Complete Genomics), you can do that here: http://genomecomb.sourceforge.net/publications/filters/filterselection.php You can customize the filter properties.Depending on how stringent you are you'll get less false positive differences and more true positive real differences between the two genomes.

Disclaimer: data and tool from my department

Answer 2

[Zaag]

Most research suggests none:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7293/full/nature08990.html

http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-15-564

Or 5:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1872497313002275

[5heikki]

If you single cell sequenced two cells from just one human, I would imagine that there would be from dozens to hundreds (if not more) SNPs. But perhaps the question is how many SNPs there are between the consensus genome sequences of twins? I imagine in this case SNP count drops dramatically..

[WouterDeCoster]

You are right about the single cell genome sequencing.