MPD: multiplex primer design for next-generation targeted sequencing

The advent of next-generation sequencing has allowed for an unprecedented study of how genomic variants, particularly those in coding regions influence traits and disease. Currently, whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing remain prohibitively costly for studying a few genetic loci in hundreds to thousands of individuals, which might be the design of a typical validation experiment for genome-wide association studies (GWAS). A number of resequencing strategies exist for such validation experiments and several rely on multiplex PCR to capture many loci in a single PCR reaction.

Multiplex PCR Design (MPD) software consists of a C library and programs used to design and pool compatible primers and a Perl package that provides convenience functions for sanitizing inputs, executing and processing the C programs, and summarizing results. To minimize human error, the package can write specifically formatted files to enable bulk oligonucleotide ordering via direct upload and addition of appropriate adapters to primers for compatibility with the 48.48 Access Array System.

The MPD C program designs primers using k-mers in a similar fashion to how BLAT finds compatible sequences [5]. It takes a specially prepared hashed version of the genome, flat dbSNP files, standard PCR parameters, and a bed file of target regions. All possible primers that cover a user-specified region are examined. Primers are immediately excluded if any of the following is true: 1) they form hairpins, 2) dimerize to each other, 3) have T_m outside the user specified range, 4) have GC content outside the user specified range, 5) occur within a repeat-masked region of the genome, 6) overlap a high frequency SNP, or 7) if the last 7 bases of the primer anneal within the amplified product. T_m and other primer characteristics were calculated using established algorithms [6]. Primers not rejected for any of these criteria are given a “quality score” which is an estimate of the primers commonness within the genome. Smaller scores represent primers with less common subsequences within them. A score of 1 would indicate that every k-mer of size 15 or smaller within the primer was absolutely unique, which is not actually possible, but scores near 1 indicate that most k-mers of size 14–15 are nearly unique. Primers with non-unique 15mers at the 3’ end of the primer are given large penalties. After all primers have been identified compatible with the supplied specification, a matrix of compatibility is created, and primer pairs are determined to be compatible if all of the following are true: 1) no primer dimerizes with another, 2) all primers have T_m’s within 2 °C, 3) primer pairs do not target overlapping regions, and 4) amplified regions are within 20% of the maximum allowable amplicons size of one another (usually, 20–30 bp). The final criterion is important to avoid race conditions where smaller amplicons predominate the reaction. Pooling begins by either selecting the primer compatible with the most or least primers and proceeds recursively until all compatible primers are pooled.

The MPD Perl package offers convenience functions to process bed files into unique regions, launch and process the MPD C program output, and check MPD primers against a local compiled version of isPcr (UCSC genome browser’s in silico PCR tool [7]). Figure 1 and an included example script demonstrates the most common usage: a configuration file and target bed file are supplied, the bed file is sanitized to the unique regions, and primer pools are created that match the design specifications on the first iteration. Primers above a set threshold are retained, and optional additional iterations are made to loosen PCR parameters up to a set threshold. Optionally, isPcr may be used to provide an orthogonal validation for PCR primer uniqueness and genomic coordinates. After the final PCR pool design, all primers are written to (1) a plain text file, (2) a file suitable for use with isPcr, and (3) an excel file that is suitable for upload for batch synthesis of oligonucleotides in 96-well plate format. Additionally, a coverage file is provided indicating which primer(s) cover what target regions. To facilitate use with the 48.48 Access Array System, required forward and reverse primer sequencing adapters may be optionally added.

For the 8 genes, we designed 330 primer pairs in 107 primer pools with an average of 2.4 primers per pool (range: 1–7). The primer pairs cover 90% (24,916 bp/27,657 bp) of the targeted bases and cover a total of 43,646 bp total because regions flanking the target are covered. The mean in silico amplicon size was 277 bp (247–300 bp) with a mean primer T_m of 60.2C (54.75–62.96C) and length of 20.8 bp (17–26 bp). We selected 47 primer pools (175 primer pairs) for wet-lab testing because they could be amplified on a single Access Array chip.

Of the 326 samples, 13 samples were excluded due to low coverage and a median of 22 primer pairs were dropped per batch due to low coverage (range 16–24). Of the failed primers, 13 failed in a single batch, which does not preclude usable data across the entire experiment whereas 18 failed in over half the batches which does. We note that the T_m and GC content was higher among failed primer pairs with a mean T_m of 62.11 °C whereas working primers had a mean of T_m 60.36 °C, which was statistically significant (T = 3.7063, p = 0.0005). The GC content of the failed reactions also tended to be higher 0.55 versus 0.50 although this was not significantly different (T = 1.7207, p = 0.096). The spearman rank correlation between the number of primers in a pool and the number of failed primers was -0.2894 (p = 0.04847) indicating that failed primers tend to occur in smaller pools suggesting that increased pool size does not lead to higher primer failure.

An average of 25,205 bp were sequenced per individual at 99.7% completeness with a mean depth of coverage of 300X (104-441X). A total of 16,295 bp were sequenced in the original targeted regions. Among the region of interest, we identified 207 SNPs, 6 insertions and 11 deletions total with each sample averaging 11.8 SNPs with 4.6 replacement and 3.6 silent sites. The overall average transition to transversion ratio was 3.16 per individual and silent to replacement ratio was 0.89. The mean minor allele frequency of 0.023 ± 0.072 for variant sites (range 0.0016–0.4313). We found dbSNP entries for 62 and 78% of the replacement and silent sites, respectively.

We demonstrate the MPD software is well suited to designing targeted resequencing experiments for use with the Access Array System (Fluidigm, San Francisco, CA, USA). We resequenced a realistic collection of genes that were proposed as candidate regions by Alzheimer’s Disease GWAS [9]. For these genes MPD was able to design primers over the majority of regions targeted, even particularly challenging regions with repetitive regions and high GC content (e.g., APOE). Importantly, the design primer pairs performed well in wet-lab testing. It is hard to directly compare the number of variants observed in our experiment to those observed through whole-exome or whole-genome sequencing because of the relatively few expected number of variants we ought to observe per subject. Most large-scale sequencing projects are interrogating millions of sites so their estimates of transition to transversion or silent to replacement ratios are more reliable than an experiment that targets only 25Kb. Despite this, the number and nature of variants we observe are consistent with high quality sequencing and compares favorably to whole-exome experiments when considering small regions in isolation. The weaknesses of multiplex PCR for next-generation sequencing are similar to those inherent in PCR-based capture methods, namely, the region must contain unique genomic sequence and not be enriched for high GC content.

Our approach for primer pooling differs from recommendations by Fluidigm in two ways. The first recommendation is that primers within a pool should be within 20% of the average amplicon size of the pool. Our software allows primers to be compatible if their amplicons are within 20% of the maximum amplicon length (e.g., for a 400 bp amplicon this threshold would be set at 80 bp) which achieves nearly the same goal that one set of amplicons dominate the reaction. The second recommendation is that pairs within a pool must anneal to targets separated by at least 5 kb. Our software checks for any annealing of amplicons within a pool to avoid interaction of amplicons within a pool, which we suppose is the intention behind the recommendation.

The MPD software is able to design multiplex PCR experiments suitable for next-generation targeted resequencing. The software allows an iterative design approach where initially stringent conditions and subsequently loosened to maximize the number of high-quality primers that are as close to the initial design criteria as biologically feasible. The MPD software coupled with the 48.48 Access Array System are well-positioned for sequencing 10-100Kb per sample on hundreds to thousands of samples and may be quickly retooled to enable shift in targeted genes as new genetic evidence emerges.