A Simple Strategy for Reducing False Negatives in Calling Variants from Single-Cell Sequencing Data

Due to the growth of interest in single-cell genomics, computational methods for distinguishing true variants from artifacts are highly desirable. While special attention has been paid to false positives in variant or mutation calling from single-cell sequencing data, an equally important but often neglected issue is that of false negatives derived from allele dropout during the amplification of single cell genomes. In this paper, we propose a simple strategy to reduce the false negatives in single-cell sequencing data analysis. Simulation results show that this method is highly reliable, with an error rate of 4.94×10-5, which is orders of magnitude lower than the expected false negative rate (~34%) estimated from a single-cell exome dataset, though the method is limited by the low SNP density in the human genome. We applied this method to analyze the exome data of a few dozen single tumor cells generated in previous studies, and extracted cell specific mutation information for a small set of sites. Interestingly, we found that there are difficulties in using the classical clonal model of tumor cell growth to explain the mutation patterns observed in some tumor cells.