Browsing by Subject "nanopore sequencing"

Genomic structural variants are large events that change the structure of the genome. These can cause changes in the functions of cells by breaking genes and genomic regulatory regions. Multiple factors are known to affect the formation of structural variants and previous studies have shown that often the sequence content in a genomic region plays a role in their formation. This study aims to characterize the sequence content around structural variant breakpoints from structural variants which have been detected from human tissue samples which have been whole genome sequenced with nanopore sequencing. The characterization was done by looking at the genomic repetitive elements found around the breakpoints, by analyzing the GC-content around the breakpoints, and by studying what kind of enriched DNA motifs were found in the sequences around the breakpoints and how these were located in these sequences. Multiple different repetitive elements were seen to occur near the breakpoint regions, and it was also observed that there were differences in what kind of repetitive elements were seen around different types of structural variants. Around the sequences of different kinds of structural variants there was also distinct differences in what kind of GC-content profiles the sequences had. In addition, various different enriched motifs were also found from the sequences and many of these showed distinct variation on how they were located around the breakpoints. These results support the previous findings showing that also here the sequence content does play a role in the formation of structural variants, but still all of the results here could not be directly explained by previous studies. In these results, it was seen that the GC-content was higher in sequences that have been affected by an event that causes structural variant formation. Also, many of the found DNA motifs were distinctly skewed around the breakpoint sequences, possibly hinting that the sequences containing these motifs would be prone to the formation of structural variants.