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Variant Discovery in High-Throughput Sequencing Data

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Developed in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute, the toolkit offers a wide variety of tools with a primary focus on variant discovery and genotyping. Its powerful processing engine and high-performance computing features make it capable of taking on projects of any size. Learn more

Why does HaplotypeCaller split one variant into two variants? (Originally one variant)

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    Gökalp Çelik

    Hi S

    If you are using default parameters for HaplotypeCaller this behavior is expected for sites that may have alternative representations which may cost less in Smith-Waterman realignment after local assembly. HaplotypeCaller by default is not aware of how pileups look in IGV and its realignment default parameters may cause representations like these ones and technically they are not wrong. Our newer versions of HaplotypeCaller can utilize pileups and add them to the reassembly path as Partially Determined Haplotypes and may bring a more refined outcome based on PDHMMs. This requires users to activate pileup calling and pdhmm however these parameters currently have other downsides. The best implementation of these parameters are in Dragen 3.7.8 compatibility mode which we call as Functional Equivalence with Illumina DRAGEN. This mode may produce variants that correspond to what pileups also support but it is much slower and currently not compatible with GVCF output. 

    We are working to get native accelerated version of PDHMM along with GVCF compatibility but that may take sometime. In the meantime if GVCF is not your target and you are working with single sample workflows you may activate functional equivalence for GATK and try to see if it works for your data. One thing to note that this mode is calibrated only for data generated on Illumina NextSeq/NovaSeq sequencers. We cannot guarantee fidelity with other short read sequencing technologies. 

    I hope this helps.

    Regards. 

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    S

    Gökalp Çelik Thank you! Gökalp! Functional equivalence is only available for GATK-Dragen? 

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    Gökalp Çelik

    Hi again. 

    FE is only for DRAGEN-GATK compatibility. However enabling pdhmm and pileup calling is not restricted to FE. You may enable those parameters individually. Yet again enabling pdhmm breaks GVCF compatibility. So your mileage may vary. 

    Regards. 

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