ConsHMM Atlas: conservation state annotations for major genomes and human genetic variation

Abstract

ConsHMM is a method recently introduced to annotate genomes into conservation states, which are defined based on the combinatorial and spatial patterns of which species align to and match a reference genome in a multi-species DNA sequence alignment. Previously, ConsHMM was only applied to a single genome for one multi-species sequence alignment. Here we apply ConsHMM to produce 22 additional genome annotations covering human and seven other organisms for a variety of multi-species alignments. Additionally, we have extended ConsHMM to generate allele specific annotations, which we used to produce conservation state annotations for every possible single nucleotide mutation in the human genome. Finally, we provide a web interface to interactively visualize parameters and annotation enrichments for ConsHMM models. These annotations and visualizations comprise the ConsHMM Atlas, which we expect will be a valuable resource for analyzing a variety of major genomes and genetic variation.