f03f56cd3c795a6fba2b8419662a9a2c5d49f69a max Sat Sep 26 14:16:17 2026 -0700 sfariSparkWgs45kAsd: now genome-wide (518M variants from the 45,178 genotype pVCFs, run on parasol); per-allele INFO fields declared Number=1 so the VCF track filters accept them, doc page no longer says DSCAM only, refs #38424 diff --git src/hg/makeDb/trackDb/human/sfariSparkExomes.html src/hg/makeDb/trackDb/human/sfariSparkExomes.html index b833859acbe..93aae17eccc 100644 --- src/hg/makeDb/trackDb/human/sfariSparkExomes.html +++ src/hg/makeDb/trackDb/human/sfariSparkExomes.html @@ -5,32 +5,31 @@ DNA samples and phenotypes. 54,558 families, parents and their children were sequenced, a total of 142,357 individuals with whole-exome (WES) and 12,519 with whole-genome sequencing (WGS). The data contains 32,559 trios and 8,895 quads (one sibling without autism), and 824 twins.
The SPARK WGS August 2026 release (SFARI Base dataset DS0000135) adds whole genomes for 45,178 individuals from 21,003 families, 20,858 of them with autism. This is a mostly new set of people: only 14 of them are also in the 12,519-genome release and 201 in the exome release. It includes about 4,900 trios with an autistic child and 1,800 quads. The genomes were sequenced PCR-free on the Illumina NovaSeq X at Broad Clinical Labs. Two tracks show this release. "SFARI SPARK 45k WGS" was made from a frequency table that SFARI released with the data. It has no autism/non-autism split, its allele counts are estimates, and variants seen only once are left out. "SFARI SPARK 45k WGS ASD" was computed from the genotypes. It has exact counts, -the autism/non-autism split and all variants, including those seen once. For now it covers -only the DSCAM gene on chr21 (see Methods). +the autism/non-autism split and all variants, including those seen once (see Methods).
The same frequencies shown here are also available publicly on the SFARI Genome Browser. See (SPARK et al, Neuron 2018) for details.
In addition to the overall allele count (AC), allele number (AN), and allele frequency (AF), each variant record carries counts split by autism status (the asd column of the SPARK individual registration file):
The track "SFARI SPARK 45k WGS ASD" was made from the genotype-level pVCFs of the same release, which are split into 2.5 Mb chunks. The samples were grouped by the asd column of the release's sample metadata file: 20,858 autistic and 24,320 non-autistic individuals, with no sample left unassigned. As for the older SPARK tracks, bcftools +fill-tags computed AC, AN and AF overall and per group from the called genotypes. Missing genotypes do not count towards AN. The genotypes were then removed. Multiallelic records were split and left-aligned with bcftools norm. Alleles that no individual -carries after joint genotyping (AC=0) were removed. There is no allele count cutoff. The -INFO field VARLEN is the length of ALT minus the length of REF: positive for -insertions, negative for deletions, 0 for substitutions. Unlike the other SPARK tracks, -this track also shows the predicted protein consequences (BCSQ) on its details -page, computed with bcftools csq against Ensembl release 115. The scripts are -sparkWgs45kPvcfToSites.sh and sparkWgs45kPvcfRange.sh. +carries after joint genotyping (AC=0) were removed. There is no allele count cutoff. +Records that GLnexus marks with the filter MONOALLELIC are alleles it could not +merge into an overlapping site. In these, only the carriers have a genotype, so AN would +count only them and AF would be 1. For these records, AN was set to twice the number of +individuals in each group and AF was recomputed from AC. The INFO field VARLEN is +the length of ALT minus the length of REF: positive for insertions, negative for +deletions, 0 for substitutions. The pVCFs were processed in 500 kb pieces on our compute +cluster. The scripts are sparkWgs45kPvcfToSites.sh, +sparkWgs45kPvcfJobs.sh and sparkWgs45kPvcfMerge.sh.
The sequencing and variant-calling methods are documented as follows by SFARI: