Rare variant discovery and calling by sequencing pooled samples with overlaps

Motivation: For many complex traits/diseases, it is believed that rare variants account for some of the missing heritability that cannot be explained by common variants. Sequencing a large number of samples through DNA pooling is a cost-effective strategy to discover rare variants and to investigate their associations with phenotypes. Overlapping pool designs provide further benefit because such approaches can potentially identify variant carriers, which is important for downstream applications of association analysis of rare variants. However, existing algorithms for analysing sequence data from overlapping pools are limited.