Exome sequencing of chronic hepatitis B infected humans and healthy controls

Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection remains endemic in large parts of the world and, as such, is a major global health issue. However, a thorough understanding of the genetic variants involved in CHB infection susceptibility remains lacking. To identify low-frequency/rare variants predisposing to CHB infection, We performed exome sequencing in 50 CHB patients and 40 healthy controls. Exome sequences were captured by NimbleGen2.1M array targeting 34 Mb of the human genome, containing 180,000 coding exons and 551 miRNA genes. The enriched library was sequenced on Illumina HiSeq 2000. Sequencing reads were aligned to human reference genome (NCBI build 36.3). After removing reads duplicates, the average sequencing depth per sample is 43X.