LASER server: ancestry tracing with genotypes or sequence reads

Daniel Taliun; Sonia P Chothani; Sebastian Schönherr; Lukas Forer; Michael Boehnke; Gonçalo R Abecasis; Chaolong Wang

doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btx075

LASER server: ancestry tracing with genotypes or sequence reads

Bioinformatics. 2017 Jul 1;33(13):2056-2058. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btx075.

Authors

Daniel Taliun¹, Sonia P Chothani², Sebastian Schönherr³, Lukas Forer³, Michael Boehnke¹, Gonçalo R Abecasis¹, Chaolong Wang²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biostatistics and Center for Statistical Genetics, University of Michigan School of Public Health, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
² Computational and Systems Biology, Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore 138672, Singapore.
³ Division of Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Medical Genetics, Molecular and Clinical Pharmacology, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck 6020, Austria.

Abstract

Summary: To enable direct comparison of ancestry background in different studies, we developed LASER to estimate individual ancestry by placing either sezquenced or genotyped samples in a common ancestry space, regardless of the sequencing strategy or genotyping array used to characterize each sample. Here we describe the LASER server to facilitate application of the method to a wide range of genetic studies. The server provides genetic ancestry estimation for different geographic regions and user-friendly interactive visualization of the results.

Availability and implementation: The LASER server is freely accessible at http://laser.sph.umich.edu/.

Contact: dtaliun@umich.edu or wangcl@gis.a-star.edu.sg.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MeSH terms

Genetic Variation*
Humans
Phylogeography / methods*
Population Groups / genetics*
Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods*
Software*

Grants and funding

R01 HG000376/HG/NHGRI NIH HHS/United States