Probabilistic Inference of Viral Quasispecies Subject to Recombination

TitleProbabilistic Inference of Viral Quasispecies Subject to Recombination
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsTöpfer, A., Zagordi O., Prabhakaran S., Roth V., Halperin E., & Beerenwinkel N.
Published inJournal of Computational Biology
Volume20
Issue2
Page(s)113-123
Other Numbers3415
Abstract

RNA viruses are present in a single host as a population ofdifferent but related strains. This population, shaped by the combinationof genetic change and selection, is called quasispecies. Genetic change isdue to both point mutations and recombination events. We present ajumping hidden Markov model that describes the generation of the viralquasispecies and a method to infer its parameters by analysing nextgeneration sequencing data. The model introduces position-specific probabilitytables over the sequence alphabet to explain the diversity that canbe found in the population at each site. Recombination events are indicatedby a change of state, allowing a single observed read to originatefrom multiple sequences. We present an implementation of the EM algorithmto find maximum likelihood estimates of the model parametersand a method to estimate the distribution of viral strains in the quasispecies.The model is validated on simulated data, showing the advantageof explicitly taking the recombination process into account, and appliedto reads obtained from two experimental HIV samples.

Bibliographic Notes

Journal of Computational Biology, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 113-123

Abbreviated Authors

A. Topfer, O. Zagordi, S. Prabhakaran, V. Roth, E. Halperin, and N. Beerenwinkel

ICSI Research Group

Algorithms

ICSI Publication Type

Article in journal or magazine