- Liu, Siyang;
- Liu, Yanhong;
- Gu, Yuqin;
- Lin, Xingchen;
- Zhu, Huanhuan;
- Liu, Hankui;
- Xu, Zhe;
- Cheng, Shiyao;
- Lan, Xianmei;
- Li, Linxuan;
- Huang, Mingxi;
- Li, Hao;
- Nielsen, Rasmus;
- Davies, Robert;
- Albrechtsen, Anders;
- Chen, Guo-Bo;
- Qiu, Xiu;
- Jin, Xin;
- Huang, Shujia
Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) employs ultra-low-pass sequencing of maternal plasma cell-free DNA to detect fetal trisomy. Its global adoption has established NIPT as a large human genetic resource for exploring genetic variations and their associations with phenotypes. Here, we present methods for analyzing large-scale, low-depth NIPT data, including customized algorithms and software for genetic variant detection, genotype imputation, family relatedness, population structure inference, and genome-wide association analysis of maternal genomes. Our results demonstrate accurate allele frequency estimation and high genotype imputation accuracy (R2>0.84) for NIPT sequencing depths from 0.1× to 0.3×. We also achieve effective classification of duplicates and first-degree relatives, along with robust principal-component analysis. Additionally, we obtain an R2>0.81 for estimating genetic effect sizes across genotyping and sequencing platforms with adequate sample sizes. These methods offer a robust theoretical and practical foundation for utilizing NIPT data in medical genetic research.