qcCHIP: an R package to identify clonal hematopoiesis variants using cohort-specific data characteristics

Xiang Liu, Yi Han Tang, James Blachly, Stephen Edge, Yasminka A. Jakubek, Martin McCarter, Abdul Rafeh Naqash, Kenneth G. Nepple, Afaf Osman, Matthew J. Reilley, Gregory Riedlinger, Bodour Salhia, Bryan P. Schneider, Craig Shriver, Michelle L. Churchman, Robert J. Rounbehler, Jamie K. Teer, Nancy Gillis*, Mingxiang Teng*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Clonal hematopoiesis (CH) is a molecular biomarker associated with various adverse outcomes in both healthy individuals and those with underlying conditions, including cancer. Detecting CH usually involves genomic sequencing of individual blood samples followed by robust bioinformatics data filtering. We report an R package, qcCHIP, a bioinformatics pipeline that implements permutation-based parameter optimization to guide quality control filtering and cohort-specific CH identification. We benchmark qcCHIP under various data settings, including different sequencing depths, ranges of cohort sizes, with and without normal-tumor paired samples, and across different cancer types. We show that qcCHIP allows users to customize analysis needs to generate CH calls based on cohort-specific data characteristics.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberbtaf522
JournalBioinformatics
Volume41
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2025

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