Population Structure, Stratification, and Introgression of Human Structural Variation

Structural variants contribute substantially to genetic diversity and are important evolutionarily and medically, but they are still understudied. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of structural variation in the Human Genome Diversity panel, a high-coverage dataset of 911 samples from 54 diverse worldwide populations. We identify, in total, 126,018 variants, 78% of which were not identified in previous global sequencing projects. Some reach high frequency and are private to continental groups or even individual populations, including regionally restricted runaway duplications and putatively introgressed variants from archaic hominins. By de novo assembly of 25 genomes using linked-read sequencing, we discover 1,643 breakpoint-resolved unique insertions, in aggregate accounting for 1.9 Mb of sequence absent from the GRCh38 reference. Our results illustrate the limitation of a single human reference and the need for high-quality genomes from diverse populations to fully discover and understand human genetic variation. [Display omitted] •Catalog of structural variants from a diverse set of human populations•Identification of high-frequency population-specific variants•Highly stratified variants putatively introgressed from Neanderthals and Denisovans•De novo genome assemblies uncover and place sequences missing from the reference Almarri et al. generate a structural variation atlas for a geographically diverse set of human genomes, including recovery of sequences missing from the human reference sequence.