scholarly journals OVarFlow: a resource optimized GATK 4 based Open source Variant calling workFlow

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Bathke ◽  
Gesine Lühken
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Open Source ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Model Organisms ◽  
Phenotypic Trait ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Major Player ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Background The advent of next generation sequencing has opened new avenues for basic and applied research. One application is the discovery of sequence variants causative of a phenotypic trait or a disease pathology. The computational task of detecting and annotating sequence differences of a target dataset between a reference genome is known as "variant calling". Typically, this task is computationally involved, often combining a complex chain of linked software tools. A major player in this field is the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK). The "GATK Best Practices" is a commonly referred recipe for variant calling. However, current computational recommendations on variant calling predominantly focus on human sequencing data and ignore ever-changing demands of high-throughput sequencing developments. Furthermore, frequent updates to such recommendations are counterintuitive to the goal of offering a standard workflow and hamper reproducibility over time. Results A workflow for automated detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms and insertion-deletions offers a wide range of applications in sequence annotation of model and non-model organisms. The introduced workflow builds on the GATK Best Practices, while enabling reproducibility over time and offering an open, generalized computational architecture. The workflow achieves parallelized data evaluation and maximizes performance of individual computational tasks. Optimized Java garbage collection and heap size settings for the GATK applications SortSam, MarkDuplicates, HaplotypeCaller, and GatherVcfs effectively cut the overall analysis time in half. Conclusions The demand for variant calling, efficient computational processing, and standardized workflows is growing. The Open source Variant calling workFlow (OVarFlow) offers automation and reproducibility for a computationally optimized variant calling task. By reducing usage of computational resources, the workflow removes prior existing entry barriers to the variant calling field and enables standardized variant calling.

scholarly journals Comparison of sequencing data processing pipelines and application to underrepresented African human populations

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwenna Breton ◽  
Anna C. V. Johansson ◽  
Per Sjödin ◽  
Carina M. Schlebusch ◽  
Mattias Jakobsson
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
High Coverage ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Bioinformatic Tools ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Background Population genetic studies of humans make increasing use of high-throughput sequencing in order to capture diversity in an unbiased way. There is an abundance of sequencing technologies, bioinformatic tools and the available genomes are increasing in number. Studies have evaluated and compared some of these technologies and tools, such as the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) and its “Best Practices” bioinformatic pipelines. However, studies often focus on a few genomes of Eurasian origin in order to detect technical issues. We instead surveyed the use of the GATK tools and established a pipeline for processing high coverage full genomes from a diverse set of populations, including Sub-Saharan African groups, in order to reveal challenges from human diversity and stratification. Results We surveyed 29 studies using high-throughput sequencing data, and compared their strategies for data pre-processing and variant calling. We found that processing of data is very variable across studies and that the GATK “Best Practices” are seldom followed strictly. We then compared three versions of a GATK pipeline, differing in the inclusion of an indel realignment step and with a modification of the base quality score recalibration step. We applied the pipelines on a diverse set of 28 individuals. We compared the pipelines in terms of count of called variants and overlap of the callsets. We found that the pipelines resulted in similar callsets, in particular after callset filtering. We also ran one of the pipelines on a larger dataset of 179 individuals. We noted that including more individuals at the joint genotyping step resulted in different counts of variants. At the individual level, we observed that the average genome coverage was correlated to the number of variants called. Conclusions We conclude that applying the GATK “Best Practices” pipeline, including their recommended reference datasets, to underrepresented populations does not lead to a decrease in the number of called variants compared to alternative pipelines. We recommend to aim for coverage of > 30X if identifying most variants is important, and to work with large sample sizes at the variant calling stage, also for underrepresented individuals and populations.

scholarly journals OVarFlow: a resource optimized GATK 4 based Open source Variant calling workFlow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Bathke ◽  
Gesine Lühken
Keyword(s):  
Next Generation Sequencing ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Data Evaluation ◽  
Phenotypic Trait ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Sequencing Technologies ◽  
Generation Sequencing

Background Next generation sequencing technologies are opening new doors to researchers. One application is the direct discovery of sequence variants that are causative for a phenotypic trait or a disease. The detection of an organisms alterations from a reference genome is know as variant calling, a computational task involving a complex chain of software applications. One key player in the field is the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK). The GATK Best Practices are commonly referred recipe for variant calling on human sequencing data. Still the fact the Best Practices are highly specialized on human sequencing data and are permanently evolving is often ignored. Reproducibility is thereby aggravated, leading to continuous reinvention of pretended GATK Best Practice workflows. Results Here we present an automatized variant calling workflow, for the detection of SNPs and indels, that is broadly applicable for model as well as non-model diploid organisms. It is derived from the GATK Best Practice workflow for "Germline short variant discovery", without being focused on human sequencing data. The workflow has been highly optimized to achieve parallelized data evaluation and also maximize performance of individual applications to shorten overall analysis time. Optimized Java garbage collection and heap size settings for the GATK applications SortSam, MarkDuplicates, HaplotypeCaller and GatherVcfs were determined by thorough benchmarking. In doing so, runtimes of an example data evaluation could be reduced from 67 h to less than 35 h. Conclusions The demand for standardized variant calling workflows is proportionally growing with the dropping costs of next generation sequencing methods. Our workflow perfectly fits into this niche, offering automatization, reproducibility and documentation of the variant calling process. Moreover resource usage is lowered to a minimum. Thereby variant calling projects should become more standardized, reducing the barrier further for smaller institutions or groups.

Population-specific genome graphs improve high-throughput sequencing data analysis: A case study on the Pan-African genome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Serhat Tetikol ◽  
Kubra Narci ◽  
Deniz Turgut ◽  
Gungor Budak ◽  
Ozem Kalay ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Sample Selection ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Population Diversity ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Bioinformatics Pipeline ◽  
Graph Augmentation

ABSTRACTGraph-based genome reference representations have seen significant development, motivated by the inadequacy of the current human genome reference for capturing the diverse genetic information from different human populations and its inability to maintain the same level of accuracy for non-European ancestries. While there have been many efforts to develop computationally efficient graph-based bioinformatics toolkits, how to curate genomic variants and subsequently construct genome graphs remains an understudied problem that inevitably determines the effectiveness of the end-to-end bioinformatics pipeline. In this study, we discuss major obstacles encountered during graph construction and propose methods for sample selection based on population diversity, graph augmentation with structural variants and resolution of graph reference ambiguity caused by information overload. Moreover, we present the case for iteratively augmenting tailored genome graphs for targeted populations and test the proposed approach on the whole-genome samples of African ancestry. Our results show that, as more representative alternatives to linear or generic graph references, population-specific graphs can achieve significantly lower read mapping errors, increased variant calling sensitivity and provide the improvements of joint variant calling without the need of computationally intensive post-processing steps.

scholarly journals Accurate fetal variant calling in the presence of maternal cell contamination

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Nabieva ◽  
Satyarth Mishra Sharma ◽  
Yermek Kapushev ◽  
Sofya K. Garushyants ◽  
Anna V. Fedotova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Chorionic Villus ◽  
Genetic Diagnosis ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Maternal Cell ◽  
Fetal Dna

AbstractHigh-throughput sequencing of fetal DNA is a promising and increasingly common method for the discovery of all (or all coding) genetic variants in the fetus, either as part of prenatal screening or diagnosis, or for genetic diagnosis of spontaneous abortions. In many cases, the fetal DNA (from chorionic villi, amniotic fluid, or abortive tissue) can be contaminated with maternal cells, resulting in the mixture of fetal and maternal DNA. This maternal cell contamination (MCC) undermines the assumption, made by traditional variant callers, that each allele in a heterozygous site is covered, on average, by 50% of the reads, and therefore can lead to erroneous genotype calls. We present a panel of methods for reducing the genotyping error in the presence of MCC. All methods start with the output of GATK HaplotypeCaller on the sequencing data for the (contaminated) fetal sample and both of its parents, and additionally rely on information about the MCC fraction (which itself is readily estimated from the high-throughput sequencing data). The first of these methods uses a Bayesian probabilistic model to correct the fetal genotype calls produced by MCC-unaware HaplotypeCaller. The other two methods “learn” the genotype-correction model from examples. We use simulated contaminated fetal data to train and test the models. Using the test sets, we show that all three methods lead to substantially improved accuracy when compared with the original MCC-unaware HaplotypeCaller calls. We then apply the best-performing method to three chorionic villus samples from spontaneously terminated pregnancies.Code and training data availabilityhttps://github.com/bazykinlab/ML-maternal-cell-contamination

scholarly journals VariFAST: a variant filter by automated scoring based on tagged-signatures

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (S22) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hang Zhang ◽  
Ke Wang ◽  
Juan Zhou ◽  
Jianhua Chen ◽  
Yizhou Xu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
False Positive ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Variant Filtering ◽  
Ngs Data Analysis ◽  
High Consistency ◽  
Ngs Data ◽  
Manual Review

Abstract Background Variant calling and refinement from whole genome/exome sequencing data is a fundamental task for genomics studies. Due to the limited accuracy of NGS sequencing and variant callers, IGV-based manual review is required for further false positive variant filtering, which costs massive labor and time, and results in high inter- and intra-lab variability. Results To overcome the limitation of manual review, we developed a novel approach for Variant Filter by Automated Scoring based on Tagged-signature (VariFAST), and also provided a pipeline integrating GATK Best Practices with VariFAST, which can be easily used for high quality variants detection from raw data. Using the bam and vcf files, VariFAST calculates a v-score by sum of weighted metrics causing false positive variations, and marks tags in the manner of keeping high consistency with manual review, for each variant. We validated the performance of VariFAST for germline variant filtering using the benchmark sequencing data from GIAB, and also for somatic variant filtering using sequencing data of both malignant carcinoma and benign adenomas as well. VariFAST also includes a predictive model trained by XGBOOST algorithm for germline variants refinement, which reveals better MCC and AUC than the state-of-the-art VQSR, especially outcompete in INDEL variant filtering. Conclusion VariFAST can assist researchers efficiently and conveniently to filter the false positive variants, including both germline and somatic ones, in NGS data analysis. The VariFAST source code and the pipeline integrating with GATK Best Practices are available at https://github.com/bioxsjtu/VariFAST.

scholarly journals Learning Sparse Log-Ratios for High-Throughput Sequencing Data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Gordon-Rodriguez ◽  
Thomas P. Quinn ◽  
John P. Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Compositional Data ◽  
Predictive Accuracy ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Genetic Sequencing ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Benchmark Datasets

AbstractThe automatic discovery of interpretable features that are associated to an outcome of interest is a central goal of bioinformatics. In the context of high-throughput genetic sequencing data, and Compositional Data more generally, an important class of features are the log-ratios between subsets of the input variables. However, the space of these log-ratios grows combinatorially with the dimension of the input, and as a result, existing learning algorithms do not scale to increasingly common high-dimensional datasets. Building on recent literature on continuous relaxations of discrete latent variables, we design a novel learning algorithm that identifies sparse log-ratios several orders of magnitude faster than competing methods. As well as dramatically reducing runtime, our method outperforms its competitors in terms of sparsity and predictive accuracy, as measured across a wide range of benchmark datasets.

scholarly journals Accurate, scalable cohort variant calls using DeepVariant and GLnexus

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taedong Yun ◽  
Helen Li ◽  
Pi-Chuan Chang ◽  
Michael F. Lin ◽  
Andrew Carroll ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Variation ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Quality Improvements ◽  
1000 Genomes Project ◽  
Genetic Analyses ◽  
1000 Genomes ◽  
Population Scale

AbstractPopulation-scale sequenced cohorts are foundational resources for genetic analyses, but processing raw reads into analysis-ready variants remains challenging. Here we introduce an open-source cohort variant-calling method using the highly-accurate caller DeepVariant and scalable merging tool GLnexus. We optimized callset quality based on benchmark samples and Mendelian consistency across many sample sizes and sequencing specifications, resulting in substantial quality improvements and cost savings over existing best practices. We further evaluated our pipeline in the 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP) samples, showing superior quality metrics and imputation performance. We publicly release the 1KGP callset to foster development of broad studies of genetic variation.

scholarly journals Disambiguate: An open-source application for disambiguating two species in next generation sequencing data from grafted samples

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 2741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miika J. Ahdesmäki ◽  
Simon R. Gray ◽  
Justin H. Johnson ◽  
Zhongwu Lai
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
High Sensitivity ◽  
Next Generation Sequencing Data ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Gene Expression Quantification ◽  
Closed Source ◽  
Generation Sequencing ◽  
Bioinformatics Community

Grafting of cell lines and primary tumours is a crucial step in the drug development process between cell line studies and clinical trials. Disambiguate is a program for computationally separating the sequencing reads of two species derived from grafted samples. Disambiguate operates on alignments to the two species and separates the components at very high sensitivity and specificity as illustrated in artificially mixed human-mouse samples. This allows for maximum recovery of data from target tumours for more accurate variant calling and gene expression quantification. Given that no general use open source algorithm accessible to the bioinformatics community exists for the purposes of separating the two species data, the proposed Disambiguate tool presents a novel approach and improvement to performing sequence analysis of grafted samples. Both Python and C++ implementations are available and they are integrated into several open and closed source pipelines. Disambiguate is open source and is freely available at https://github.com/AstraZeneca-NGS/disambiguate.

scholarly journals NASQAR: A web-based platform for high-throughput sequencing data analysis and visualization

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayman Yousif ◽  
Nizar Drou ◽  
Jillian Rowe ◽  
Mohammed Khalfan ◽  
Kristin C Gunsalus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Open Source ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Web Applications ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Link Type

AbstractBackgroundAs high-throughput sequencing applications continue to evolve, the rapid growth in quantity and variety of sequence-based data calls for the development of new software libraries and tools for data analysis and visualization. Often, effective use of these tools requires computational skills beyond those of many researchers. To ease this computational barrier, we have created a dynamic web-based platform, NASQAR (Nucleic Acid SeQuence Analysis Resource).ResultsNASQAR offers a collection of custom and publicly available open-source web applications that make extensive use of a variety of R packages to provide interactive data analysis and visualization. The platform is publicly accessible at http://nasqar.abudhabi.nyu.edu/. Open-source code is on GitHub at https://github.com/nasqar/NASQAR, and the system is also available as a Docker image at https://hub.docker.com/r/aymanm/nasqarall. NASQAR is a collaboration between the core bioinformatics teams of the NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU New York Centers for Genomics and Systems Biology.ConclusionsNASQAR empowers non-programming experts with a versatile and intuitive toolbox to easily and efficiently explore, analyze, and visualize their Transcriptomics data interactively. Popular tools for a variety of applications are currently available, including Transcriptome Data Preprocessing, RNA-seq Analysis (including Single-cell RNA-seq), Metagenomics, and Gene Enrichment.

scholarly journals Evaluating assembly and variant calling software for strain-resolved analysis of large DNA-viruses

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z.-L. Deng ◽  
A. Dhingra ◽  
A. Fritz ◽  
J. Götting ◽  
P. C. Münch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Large Fraction ◽  
Variant Calling ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Library Preparation ◽  
Experimental Protocol ◽  
Dna Viruses ◽  
Benchmark Data ◽  
General Public License

AbstractInfection with human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) can cause severe complications in immunocompromised individuals and congenitally infected children. Characterizing heterogeneous viral populations and their evolution by high-throughput sequencing of clinical specimens requires the accurate assembly of individual strains or sequence variants and suitable variant calling methods. However, the performance of most methods has not been assessed for populations composed of low divergent viral strains with large genomes, such as HCMV. In an extensive benchmarking study, we evaluated 15 assemblers and six variant callers on ten lab-generated benchmark data sets created with two different library preparation protocols, to identify best practices and challenges for analyzing such data.Most assemblers, especially metaSPAdes and IVA, performed well across a range of metrics in recovering abundant strains. However, only one, Savage, recovered low abundant strains and in a highly fragmented manner. Two variant callers, LoFreq and VarScan2, excelled across all strain abundances. Both shared a large fraction of false positive (FP) variant calls, which were strongly enriched in T to G changes in a “G.G” context. The magnitude of this context-dependent systematic error is linked to the experimental protocol. We provide all benchmarking data, results and the entire benchmarking workflow named QuasiModo, Quasispecies Metric determination on omics, under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (https://github.com/hzi-bifo/Quasimodo), to enable full reproducibility and further benchmarking on these and other data.

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