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Workflow

To call variants with the GATK using pedigree information, you should base your workflow on the Best Practices recommendations -- the principles detailed there all apply to pedigree analysis.

But there is one crucial addition: you should make sure to pass a pedigree file (PED file) to all GATK walkers that you use in your workflow. Some will deliver better results if they see the pedigree data.

At the moment there are two of the standard annotations affected by pedigree:

• Allele Frequency (computed on founders only)
• Inbreeding coefficient (computed on founders only)

Trio Analysis

In the specific case of trios, an additional GATK walker, PhaseByTransmission, should be used to obtain trio-aware genotypes as well as phase by descent.

Important note

The annotations mentioned above have been adapted for PED files starting with GATK v.1.6. If you already have VCF files generated by an older version of the GATK or have not passed a PED file while running the UnifiedGenotyper or VariantAnnotator, you should do the following:

• Run the latest version of the VariantAnnotator to re-annotate your variants.
• Re-annotate all the standard annotations by passing the argument -G StandardAnnotation to VariantAnnotator. Make sure you pass your PED file to the VariantAnnotator as well!
• If you are using Variant Quality Score Recalibration (VQSR) with the InbreedingCoefficient as an annotation in your model, you should re-run VQSR once the InbreedingCoefficient is updated.

PED files

The PED files used as input for these tools are based on PLINK pedigree files. The general description can be found here.

For these tools, the PED files must contain only the first 6 columns from the PLINK format PED file, and no alleles, like a FAM file in PLINK.

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