Genome Analysis Toolkit

Variant Discovery in High-Throughput Sequencing Data

GATK process banner

Need Help?

Search our documentation

Community Forum

Hi, How can we help?

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

How do I call germline variants with multiple samples -non human?

Answered
0

5 comments

  • Avatar
    Jody Hey

    just to add - I do have a reference genome,  and the genome is fairly small relative to human,  without as many repeat issues. 

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Avatar
    Genevieve Brandt (she/her)

    Hi Jody Hey,

    The GATK support team is focused on resolving questions about GATK tool-specific errors and abnormal results from the tools. For all other questions, such as this one, we are building a backlog to work through when we have the capacity.

    Please continue to post your questions because we will be mining them for improvements to documentation, resources, and tools.

    We cannot guarantee a reply, however, we ask other community members to help out if you know the answer.

    For context, check out our support policy.

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Avatar
    Genevieve Brandt (she/her)

    Hi Jody Hey,

    We don't have a Best Practices pipeline for this at the moment, but you can generally run our tools on non-human samples. There are many examples on the forum of people with similar use cases. For even more conversation, you can check out our legacy forum site (some of it is out of date, so keep in mind): https://sites.google.com/a/broadinstitute.org/legacy-gatk-forum-discussions/

    Some aspects of GATK are meant to only work for humans, for example the SV pipeline, and the SNP and INDEL heterozygosity. But many tools are flexible, for example, HaplotypeCaller, which is our Best Practices variant caller for germline. See this document for more details: https://gatk.broadinstitute.org/hc/en-us/articles/360035535932-Germline-short-variant-discovery-SNPs-Indels-

    Best,

    Genevieve

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Avatar
    Domniki Manousi

    Dear Genevieve-Brandt-she-her 

    I am also looking into the GATK-SV tool to identify variants in non-human genomes. Is the tool still restricted to human-genome use? If yes, then would the beta tool StructuralVariationDiscoveryPipelineSpark provide a reliable alternative for a non-human genome? 

    Best regards

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Avatar
    Genevieve Brandt (she/her)

    Thanks for writing in with this question Domniki Manousi. The GATK-SV tool was built for human use, but I do know that there are some groups using it for non-human data as well. It won't work out of the box - you'll need to do some modifications of the workflow, there are definitely some points where the chromosome names are hard coded.

    We no longer maintain the spark pipeline, so I wouldn't recommend trying it out at this point.

    0
    Comment actions Permalink

Please sign in to leave a comment.

Powered by Zendesk