Identification of cromosomal translocation hotspots via scan statistics

The detection of genomic regions unusually rich in a given pattern is an important undertaking in the analysis of next generation sequencing data. Recent studies of chromosomal translocations in activated B lymphocytes have identified regions that are frequently translocated to c-myc oncogene. A quantitative method for the identification of translocation hotspots was crucial to this study. Here we improve this analysis by using a simple probabilistic model and the framework provided by scan statistics to define the number and location of translocation breakpoint hotspots. A key feature of our method is that it provides a global chromosome-wide significance level to clustering, as opposed to previous methods based on local criteria. Whilst being motivated by a specific application, the detection of unusual clusters is a widespread problem in bioinformatics. We expect our method to be useful in the analysis of data from other experimental approaches such as of ChIP-seq and 4C-seq.