NyuWa Genome Resource: Deep Whole Genome Sequencing Based Chinese Population Variation Profile and Reference Panel

Abstract The lack of Chinese population specific haplotype reference panel and whole genome sequencing resources has greatly hindered the genetics studies in the world’s largest population. Here we presented the NyuWa genome resource of 71.1M SNPs and 8.2M indels based on deep (26.2X) sequencing of 2,999 Chinese individuals, and constructed NyuWa reference panel of 5,804 haplotypes and 19.3M variants, which is the first publicly available Chinese population specific reference panel with thousands of samples. There were 25.0M novel variants in NyuWa genome resource, and 3.2M specific variants in NyuWa reference panel. Compared with other panels, NyuWa reference panel reduces the Han Chinese imputation error rate by the range of 30% to 51%. Population structure and imputation simulation tests supported the applicability of one integrated reference panel for both northern and southern Chinese. In addition, a total of 22,504 loss-of-function variants in coding and noncoding genes were identified, including 11,493 novel variants. These results highlight the value of NyuWa genome resource to facilitate genetics research in Chinese and Asian populations.