S-CAP extends clinical-grade pathogenicity prediction to genetic variants that affect RNA splicing

Abstract

There are over 15,000 known variants that cause human inherited disease by disrupting RNA splicing. While several in silico methods such as CADD, EIGEN and LINSIGHT are commonly used to predict the pathogenicity of noncoding variants, we introduce S-CAP, a tool developed specially for splicing which is better able to effectively distinguish pathogenic splicing-relevant variants from benign variants. S-CAP is a novel splicing pathogenicity predictor that reduces the number of splicing-relevant variants of uncertain significance in patient exomes by 41%, a nearly 3-fold improvement over existing noncoding pathogenicity measures while correctly classifying known pathogenic splicing-relevant variants with a clinical-grade 95% sensitivity.