Intersect-then-combine approach: improving the performance of somatic variant calling in whole exome sequencing data using multiple aligners and callers

oleh: Maurizio Callari, Stephen-John Sammut, Leticia De Mattos-Arruda, Alejandra Bruna, Oscar M. Rueda, Suet-Feung Chin, Carlos Caldas

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: BMC 2017-04-01

Deskripsi

Abstract Bioinformatic analysis of genomic sequencing data to identify somatic mutations in cancer samples is far from achieving the required robustness and standardisation. In this study we generated a whole exome sequencing benchmark dataset using the platinum genome sample NA12878 and developed an intersect-then-combine (ITC) approach to increase the accuracy in calling single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and indels in tumour-normal pairs. We evaluated the effect of alignment, base quality recalibration, mutation caller and filtering on sensitivity and false positive rate. The ITC approach increased the sensitivity up to 17.1%, without increasing the false positive rate per megabase (FPR/Mb) and its validity was confirmed in a set of clinical samples.