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Shuffling haplotypes to share reference panels for imputation

We present a method to alleviate re-identification risks behind sharing haplotype reference panels for imputation. In an anonymized reference panel, one might try to infer the genomes’ phenotypes to re-identify their owner. Our method protects against such attack by shuffling the reference panels genomes while maintaining imputation accuracy.

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Fig. 1: RESHAPE removes genome–phenome links from reference panels.

References

  1. Das, S., Abecasis, G. R. & Browning, B. L. Genotype imputation from large reference panels. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 31, 73–96 (2018). A review article that presents an overview of genotype imputation and that describes imputation techniques relying on large reference panels.

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  3. Bycroft, C. et al. The UK Biobank resource with deep phenotyping and genomic data. Nature 562, 203–209 (2018). A gold-standard large dataset used for imputation shared under stringent restrictions.

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  4. The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium. A global reference for human genetic variation. Nature 526, 68–74 (2015). A gold-standard small dataset used for imputation shared with no restrictions.

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This is a summary of: Cavinato, T. et al. A resampling-based approach to share reference panels. Nat. Comput. Sci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00630-7 (2024).

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Shuffling haplotypes to share reference panels for imputation. Nat Comput Sci 4, 320–321 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00640-5

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