Biomedical subjects

Minggao He

Publications and source records attributed to Minggao He.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2026

Leveraging ONT move table values for signal aware variant calling.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing enables long-range haplotype phasing and contiguous genome assembly but still exhibits elevated error rates that challenge small variant calling, particularly for insertions and deletions (Indels). While raw electrical signals contain rich information, existing signal-aware methods require computationally intensive processing of large signal files. Here, we present Clair3 v2, a method that leverages the ONT move table-a lightweight byproduct of basecalling that maps signal events to nucleotide positions-to improve variant calling accuracy. Clair3 v2 builds upon Clair3 and integrates signal-level dwelling time to significantly enhance variant calling performance. We also propose a genome position based circular buffer to incorporate dwelling time with minimal computational overhead. Benchmarking across six Genome in a Bottle samples demonstrates substantial improvements in variant calling accuracy. With HAC basecalling, Clair3 v2 achieves a mean SNP F1-score of 97.69% at 10 × depth (compared to 96.45% for baseline Clair3), and Indel F1 scores improved from 64.27% to 76.70%, while gains persisted at higher depths. The benefits were most pronounced for longer Indels and in complex genomic regions, where Indel F1 scores in long homopolymer regions improved from 14.3% to 45.2%. Benchmark results across various basecalling modes, samples, and coverage settings outperformed Clair3 baselines and other methods, including DeepVariant and Dorado Variant, and demonstrate the significant benefits of Clair3 v2. Furthermore, Clair3 v2 incurs negligible runtime compared to standard Clair3, making it practical for routine use.

Sequence Analysis, DNA↗

PubMed2026

Accelerated long-read variant calling with Clair3 for whole-genome sequencing.

SUMMARY: The rapid growth of genomic data and increasing adoption of long-read sequencing technologies have rendered variant calling one of the most computationally demanding tasks in genomic analysis. Although deep learning-based methods currently outperform conventional approaches in distinguishing true variants from complex sequencing noise, they impose prohibitive computational and time requirements. To address this limitation, we present a computational framework based on Clair3 that integrates parallelized feature generation, enhanced variant phasing, in-memory read haplotagging, and GPU-accelerated neural network inference to accelerate variant calling. By dynamically optimizing the use of both GPU and CPU resources, our method achieves substantial runtime improvements without compromising accuracy. We evaluated our framework across a range of sequencing depths, diverse samples, and multiple hardware configurations. Our results demonstrate that the optimized pipeline completes variant calling for a 30× whole-genome sequence in 12-20 minutes using standard computational resources (32 CPU threads and one NVIDIA GPU), and in 12-15 minutes on an Apple Mac Studio (32 threads), which is ∼10-20-fold speedup compared with its initial release. In addition to exceptional efficiency, our method maintains state-of-the-art accuracy, achieving SNP F1-scores of 99.32% and 99.70% on 30× ONT and PacBio GIAB HG003 datasets, respectively. This work introduces a rapid, accurate, and scalable variant calling framework that effectively supports large-cohort genomic studies and time-sensitive clinical applications. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The accelerated implementation of Clair3 is open source and available at: https://github.com/HKU-BAL/Clair3/tree/gpu.

Whole Genome Sequencing↗