The characterization of twenty sequenced human genomes

We present the analysis of twenty human genomes to evaluate the prospects for identifying rare functional variants that contribute to a phenotype of interest. We sequenced at high coverage ten "case" genomes from individuals with severe hemophilia A and ten "control" genomes. We summarize the number of genetic variants emerging from a study of this magnitude, and provide a proof of concept for the identification of rare and highly-penetrant functional variants by confirming that the cause of hemophilia A is easily recognizable in this data set. We also show that the number of novel single nucleotide variants (SNVs) discovered per genome seems to stabilize at about 144,000 new variants per genome, after the first 15 individuals have been sequenced. Finally, we find that, on average, each genome carries 165 homozygous protein-truncating or stop loss variants in genes representing a diverse set of pathways.