Evaluating the quality of the 1000 genomes project data

Background Data from the 1000 Genomes project is quite often used as a reference for human genomic analysis. However, its accuracy needs to be assessed to understand the quality of predictions made using this reference. We present here an assessment of the genotyping, phasing, and imputation accuracy data in the 1000 Genomes project. We compare the phased haplotype calls from the 1000 Genomes project to experimentally phased haplotypes for 28 of the same individuals sequenced using the 10X Genomics platform. Results We observe that phasing and imputation for rare variants are unreliable, which likely reflects the limited sample size of the 1000 Genomes project data. Further, it appears that using a population specific reference panel does not improve the accuracy of imputation over using the entire 1000 Genomes data set as a reference panel. We also note that the error rates and trends depend on the choice of definition of error, and hence any error reporting needs to take these definitions into account. Conclusions The quality of the 1000 Genomes data needs to be considered while using this database for further studies. This work presents an analysis that can be used for these assessments. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-019-5957-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.