Education Chapter 6 : Structural Variation and Medical Genomics

Differences between individual human genomes, or between human and cancer genomes, range in scale from single nucleotide variants (SNVs) through intermediate and large-scale duplications, deletions, and rearrangements of genomic segments. The latter class, called structural variants (SVs), have received considerable attention in the past several years as they are a previously under appreciated source of variation in human genomes. Much of this recent attention is the result of the availability of higherresolution technologies for measuring these variants, including both microarray-based techniques, and more recently, high-throughput DNA sequencing. We describe the genomic technologies and computational techniques currently used to measure SVs, focusing on applications in human and cancer genomics. This article is part of the ‘‘Translational Bioinformatics’’ collection for PLOS Computational Biology.