A genomic mutational constraint map using variation in 76,156 human genomes.

The depletion of disruptive variation caused by purifying natural selection (constraint) has been widely used to investigate protein-coding genes underlying human disorders1-4, but attempts to assess constraint for non-protein-coding regions have proved more difficult. Here we aggregate, process and release a dataset of 76,156 human genomes from the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)-the largest public open-access human genome allele frequency reference dataset-and use it to build a genomic constraint map for the whole genome (genomic non-coding constraint of haploinsufficient variation (Gnocchi)). We present a refined mutational model that incorporates local sequence context and regional genomic features to detect depletions of variation. As expected, the average constraint for protein-coding sequences is stronger than that for non-coding regions. Within the non-coding genome, constrained regions are enriched for known regulatory elements and variants that are implicated in complex human diseases and traits, facilitating the triangulation of biological annotation, disease association and natural selection to non-coding DNA analysis. More constrained regulatory elements tend to regulate more constrained protein-coding genes, which in turn suggests that non-coding constraint can aid the identification of constrained genes that are as yet unrecognized by current gene constraint metrics. We demonstrate that this genome-wide constraint map improves the identification and interpretation of functional human genetic variation.

The mutational constraint spectrum quantified from variation in 141,456 humans.

Genetic variants that inactivate protein-coding genes are a powerful source of information about the phenotypic consequences of gene disruption: genes that are crucial for the function of an organism will be depleted of such variants in natural populations, whereas non-essential genes will tolerate their accumulation. However, predicted loss-of-function variants are enriched for annotation errors, and tend to be found at extremely low frequencies, so their analysis requires careful variant annotation and very large sample sizes1. Here we describe the aggregation of 125,748 exomes and 15,708 genomes from human sequencing studies into the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD). We identify 443,769 high-confidence predicted loss-of-function variants in this cohort after filtering for artefacts caused by sequencing and annotation errors. Using an improved model of human mutation rates, we classify human protein-coding genes along a spectrum that represents tolerance to inactivation, validate this classification using data from model organisms and engineered human cells, and show that it can be used to improve the power of gene discovery for both common and rare diseases.