Jointly benchmarking small and structural variant calls with vcfdist

Genome Biol. 2024 Oct 2;25(1):253. doi: 10.1186/s13059-024-03394-5.

Abstract

In this work, we extend vcfdist to be the first variant call benchmarking tool to jointly evaluate phased single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), small insertions/deletions (INDELs), and structural variants (SVs) for the whole genome. First, we find that a joint evaluation of small and structural variants uniformly reduces measured errors for SNPs (- 28.9%), INDELs (- 19.3%), and SVs (- 52.4%) across three datasets. vcfdist also corrects a common flaw in phasing evaluations, reducing measured flip errors by over 50%. Lastly, we show that vcfdist is more accurate than previously published works and on par with the newest approaches while providing improved result interpretability.

Keywords: Benchmarking; Comparison; Deletion; Insertion; Phasing; Single-nucleotide polymorphism; Structural variation; Variant calling.

MeSH terms

  • Benchmarking*
  • Genome, Human
  • Genomic Structural Variation
  • Humans
  • INDEL Mutation*
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide*
  • Software*