# Tagged with #intermediate 26 documentation articles | 0 announcements | 0 forum discussions

If you are sure that you cannot use VQSR / recalibrate variants (typically because your dataset is too small, or because there are no truth/training resources available for your organism), then you will need to use the VariantFiltration tool to manually filter your variants. To do this, you will need to compose filter expressions as explained here, here and here based on the recommendations detailed further below.

### But first, some caveats

Let's be painfully clear about this: there is no magic formula that will give you perfect results. Filtering variants manually, using thresholds on annotation values, is subject to all sorts of caveats. The appropriateness of both the annotations and the threshold values is very highly dependent on the specific callset, how it was called, what the data was like, etc.

HOWEVER, because we want to help and people always say that something is better than nothing (not necessarily true, but let's go with that for now), we have formulated some generic recommendations that should at least provide a starting point for people to experiment with their data.

In case you didn't catch that bit in bold there, we're saying that you absolutely SHOULD NOT expect to run these commands and be done with your analysis. You absolutely SHOULD expect to have to evaluate your results critically and TRY AGAIN with some parameter adjustments until you find the settings that are right for your data.

In addition, please note that these recommendations are mainly designed for dealing with very small data sets (in terms of both number of samples or size of targeted regions). If you are not using VQSR because you do not have training/truth resources available for your organism, then you should expect to have to do even more tweaking on the filtering parameters.

So, here are some recommended arguments to use with VariantFiltration when ALL other options are unavailable to you:

### Filtering recommendations for SNPs:

• QD < 2.0
• MQ < 40.0
• FS > 60.0
• HaplotypeScore > 13.0 only for variants output byUnifiedGenotyper; for HaplotypeCaller's output it is not informative
• MQRankSum < -12.5
• ReadPosRankSum < -8.0

### Filtering recommendations for indels:

• QD < 2.0
• ReadPosRankSum < -20.0
• InbreedingCoeff < -0.8
• FS > 200.0

### And now some more IMPORTANT caveats (don't skip this!)

• The InbreedingCoeff statistic is a population-level calculation that is only available with 10 or more samples. If you have fewer samples you will need to omit that particular filter statement.

• For shallow-coverage (<10x), it is virtually impossible to use manual filtering to reliably separate true positives from false positives. You really, really, really should use the protocol involving variant quality score recalibration. If you can't do that, maybe you need to take a long hard look at your experimental design. In any case you're probably in for a world of pain.

• The maximum DP (depth) filter only applies to whole genome data, where the probability of a site having exactly N reads given an average coverage of M is a well-behaved function. First principles suggest this should be a binomial sampling but in practice it is more a Gaussian distribution. Regardless, the DP threshold should be set a 5 or 6 sigma from the mean coverage across all samples, so that the DP > X threshold eliminates sites with excessive coverage caused by alignment artifacts. Note that for exomes, a straight DP filter shouldn't be used because the relationship between misalignments and depth isn't clear for capture data.

### Finally, a note of hope

Some bits of this article may seem harsh, or depressing. Sorry. We believe in giving you the cold hard truth.

HOWEVER, we do understand that this is one of the major points of pain that GATK users encounter -- along with understanding how VQSR works, so really, whichever option you go with, you're going to suffer.

Tell us what you'd like to see here, and we'll do our best to make it happen. (no unicorns though, we're out of stock)

We also welcome testimonials from you. We are one small team; you are a legion of analysts all trying different things. Please feel free to come forward and share your findings on what works particularly well in your hands.

VariantEval accepts two types of modules: stratification and evaluation modules.

• Stratification modules will stratify (group) the variants based on certain properties.
• Evaluation modules will compute certain metrics for the variants

### CpG

CpG is a three-state stratification:

• The locus is a CpG site ("CpG")
• The locus is not a CpG site ("non_CpG")
• The locus is either a CpG or not a CpG site ("all")

A CpG site is defined as a site where the reference base at a locus is a C and the adjacent reference base in the 3' direction is a G.

### EvalRod

EvalRod is an N-state stratification, where N is the number of eval rods bound to VariantEval.

### Sample

Sample is an N-state stratification, where N is the number of samples in the eval files.

### Filter

Filter is a three-state stratification:

• The locus passes QC filters ("called")
• The locus fails QC filters ("filtered")
• The locus either passes or fails QC filters ("raw")

### FunctionalClass

FunctionalClass is a four-state stratification:

• The locus is a synonymous site ("silent")
• The locus is a missense site ("missense")
• The locus is a nonsense site ("nonsense")
• The locus is of any functional class ("any")

### CompRod

CompRod is an N-state stratification, where N is the number of comp tracks bound to VariantEval.

### Degeneracy

Degeneracy is a six-state stratification:

• The underlying base position in the codon is 1-fold degenerate ("1-fold")
• The underlying base position in the codon is 2-fold degenerate ("2-fold")
• The underlying base position in the codon is 3-fold degenerate ("3-fold")
• The underlying base position in the codon is 4-fold degenerate ("4-fold")
• The underlying base position in the codon is 6-fold degenerate ("6-fold")
• The underlying base position in the codon is degenerate at any level ("all")

### JexlExpression

JexlExpression is an N-state stratification, where N is the number of JEXL expressions supplied to VariantEval. See [[Using JEXL expressions]]

### Novelty

Novelty is a three-state stratification:

• The locus overlaps the knowns comp track (usually the dbSNP track) ("known")
• The locus does not overlap the knowns comp track ("novel")
• The locus either overlaps or does not overlap the knowns comp track ("all")

### CountVariants

CountVariants is an evaluation module that computes the following metrics:

Metric Definition
nProcessedLoci Number of processed loci
nCalledLoci Number of called loci
nRefLoci Number of reference loci
nVariantLoci Number of variant loci
variantRate Variants per loci rate
variantRatePerBp Number of variants per base
nSNPs Number of snp loci
nInsertions Number of insertion
nDeletions Number of deletions
nComplex Number of complex loci
nNoCalls Number of no calls loci
nHets Number of het loci
nHomRef Number of hom ref loci
nHomVar Number of hom var loci
nSingletons Number of singletons
heterozygosity heterozygosity per locus rate
heterozygosityPerBp heterozygosity per base pair
hetHomRatio heterozygosity to homozygosity ratio
indelRate indel rate (insertion count + deletion count)
indelRatePerBp indel rate per base pair
deletionInsertionRatio deletion to insertion ratio

### CompOverlap

CompOverlap is an evaluation module that computes the following metrics:

Metric Definition
nEvalSNPs number of eval SNP sites
nCompSNPs number of comp SNP sites
novelSites number of eval sites outside of comp sites
nVariantsAtComp number of eval sites at comp sites (that is, sharing the same locus as a variant in the comp track, regardless of whether the alternate allele is the same)
compRate percentage of eval sites at comp sites
nConcordant number of concordant sites (that is, for the sites that share the same locus as a variant in the comp track, those that have the same alternate allele)
concordantRate the concordance rate

#### Understanding the output of CompOverlap

A SNP in the detection set is said to be 'concordant' if the position exactly matches an entry in dbSNP and the allele is the same. To understand this and other output of CompOverlap, we shall examine a detailed example. First, consider a fake dbSNP file (headers are suppressed so that one can see the important things):

 $grep -v '##' dbsnp.vcf #CHROM POS ID REF ALT QUAL FILTER INFO 1 10327 rs112750067 T C . . ASP;R5;VC=SNP;VP=050000020005000000000100;WGT=1;dbSNPBuildID=132  Now, a detection set file with a single sample, where the variant allele is the same as listed in dbSNP: $ grep -v '##' eval_correct_allele.vcf
#CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO    FORMAT            001-6
1       10327   .       T       C       5168.52 PASS    ...     GT:AD:DP:GQ:PL    0/1:357,238:373:99:3959,0,4059


Finally, a detection set file with a single sample, but the alternate allele differs from that in dbSNP:

 $grep -v '##' eval_incorrect_allele.vcf #CHROM POS ID REF ALT QUAL FILTER INFO FORMAT 001-6 1 10327 . T A 5168.52 PASS ... GT:AD:DP:GQ:PL 0/1:357,238:373:99:3959,0,4059  Running VariantEval with just the CompOverlap module: $ java -jar $STING_DIR/dist/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T VariantEval \ -R /seq/references/Homo_sapiens_assembly19/v1/Homo_sapiens_assembly19.fasta \ -L 1:10327 \ -B:dbsnp,VCF dbsnp.vcf \ -B:eval_correct_allele,VCF eval_correct_allele.vcf \ -B:eval_incorrect_allele,VCF eval_incorrect_allele.vcf \ -noEV \ -EV CompOverlap \ -o eval.table  We find that the eval.table file contains the following: $ grep -v '##' eval.table | column -t
CompOverlap  CompRod  EvalRod                JexlExpression  Novelty  nEvalVariants  nCompVariants  novelSites  nVariantsAtComp  compRate      nConcordant  concordantRate
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_correct_allele    none            all      1              1              0           1                100.00000000  1            100.00000000
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_correct_allele    none            known    1              1              0           1                100.00000000  1            100.00000000
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_correct_allele    none            novel    0              0              0           0                0.00000000    0            0.00000000
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_incorrect_allele  none            all      1              1              0           1                100.00000000  0            0.00000000
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_incorrect_allele  none            known    1              1              0           1                100.00000000  0            0.00000000
CompOverlap  dbsnp    eval_incorrect_allele  none            novel    0              0              0           0                0.00000000    0            0.00000000


As you can see, the detection set variant was listed under nVariantsAtComp (meaning the variant was seen at a position listed in dbSNP), but only the eval_correct_allele dataset is shown to be concordant at that site, because the allele listed in this dataset and dbSNP match.

### TiTvVariantEvaluator

TiTvVariantEvaluator is an evaluation module that computes the following metrics:

Metric Definition
nTi number of transition loci
nTv number of transversion loci
tiTvRatio the transition to transversion ratio
nTiInComp number of comp transition sites
nTvInComp number of comp transversion sites
TiTvRatioStandard the transition to transversion ratio for comp sites

As featured in this forum question.

Two main things account for these kinds of differences, both linked to default behaviors of the tools:

• The tools downsample to different depths of coverage

• The tools apply different read filters

In both cases, you can end up looking at different sets or numbers of reads, which causes some of the annotation values to be different. It's usually not a cause for alarm. Remember that many of these annotations should be interpreted relatively, not absolutely.

## Brief introduction to reference metadata (RMDs)

Note that the -B flag referred to below is deprecated; these docs need to be updated

The GATK allows you to process arbitrary numbers of reference metadata (RMD) files inside of walkers (previously we called this reference ordered data, or ROD). Common RMDs are things like dbSNP, VCF call files, and refseq annotations. The only real constraints on RMD files is that:

• They must contain information necessary to provide contig and position data for each element to the GATK engine so it knows with what loci to associate the RMD element.

• The file must be sorted with regard to the reference fasta file so that data can be accessed sequentially by the engine.

• The file must have a Tribble RMD parsing class associated with the file type so that elements in the RMD file can be parsed by the engine.

Inside of the GATK the RMD system has the concept of RMD tracks, which associate an arbitrary string name with the data in the associated RMD file. For example, the VariantEval module uses the named track eval to get calls for evaluation, and dbsnp as the track containing the database of known variants.

## How do I get reference metadata files into my walker?

RMD files are extremely easy to get into the GATK using the -B syntax:

java -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -R Homo_sapiens_assembly18.fasta -T PrintRODs -B:variant,VCF calls.vcf


In this example, the GATK will attempt to parse the file calls.vcf using the VCF parser and bind the VCF data to the RMD track named variant.

In general, you can provide as many RMD bindings to the GATK as you like:

java -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -R Homo_sapiens_assembly18.fasta -T PrintRODs -B:calls1,VCF calls1.vcf -B:calls2,VCF calls2.vcf


Works just as well. Some modules may require specifically named RMD tracks -- like eval above -- and some are happy to just assess all RMD tracks of a certain class and work with those -- like VariantsToVCF.

In this snippet from SNPDensityWalker, we grab the eval track as a VariantContext object, only for the variants that are of type SNP:

public Pair<VariantContext, GenomeLoc> map(RefMetaDataTracker tracker, ReferenceContext ref, AlignmentContext context) {
VariantContext vc = tracker.getVariantContext(ref, "eval", EnumSet.of(VariantContext.Type.SNP), context.getLocation(), false);
}


### 2. Grabbing anything that's convertable to a VariantContext

From VariantsToVCF we call the helper function tracker.getVariantContexts to look at all of the RMDs and convert what it can to VariantContext objects.

Allele refAllele = new Allele(Character.toString(ref.getBase()), true);
Collection<VariantContext> contexts = tracker.getVariantContexts(INPUT_RMD_NAME, ALLOWED_VARIANT_CONTEXT_TYPES, context.getLocation(), refAllele, true, false);


### 3. Looking at all of the RMDs

Here's a totally general code snippet from PileupWalker.java. This code, as you can see, iterates over all of the GATKFeature objects in the reference ordered data, converting each RMD to a string and capturing these strings in a list. It finally grabs the dbSNP binding specifically for a more detailed string conversion, and then binds them all up in a single string for display along with the read pileup.

private String getReferenceOrderedData( RefMetaDataTracker tracker ) { ArrayList rodStrings = new ArrayList(); for ( GATKFeature datum : tracker.getAllRods() ) { if ( datum != null && ! (datum.getUnderlyingObject() instanceof DbSNPFeature)) { rodStrings.add(((ReferenceOrderedDatum)datum.getUnderlyingObject()).toSimpleString()); // TODO: Aaron: this line still survives, try to remove it } } String rodString = Utils.join(", ", rodStrings);

        DbSNPFeature dbsnp = tracker.lookup(DbSNPHelper.STANDARD_DBSNP_TRACK_NAME, DbSNPFeature.class);

if ( dbsnp != null)
rodString += DbSNPHelper.toMediumString(dbsnp);

if ( !rodString.equals("") )
rodString = "[ROD: " + rodString + "]";

return rodString;
}


## How do I write my own RMD types?

Tracks of reference metadata are loaded using the Tribble infrastructure. Tracks are loaded using the feature codec and underlying type information. See the Tribble documentation for more information.

Tribble codecs that are in the classpath are automatically found; the GATK discovers all classes that implement the FeatureCodec class. Name resolution occurs using the -B type parameter, i.e. if the user specified:

-B:calls1,VCF calls1.vcf


The GATK looks for a FeatureCodec called VCFCodec.java to decode the record type. Alternately, if the user specified:

-B:calls1,MYAwesomeFormat calls1.maft


THe GATK would look for a codec called MYAwesomeFormatCodec.java. This look-up is not case sensitive, i.e. it will resolve MyAwEsOmEfOrMaT as well, though why you would want to write something so painfully ugly to read is beyond us.

## 1. Overview

The Tribble project was started as an effort to overhaul our reference-ordered data system; we had many different formats that were shoehorned into a common framework that didn't really work as intended. What we wanted was a common framework that allowed for searching of reference ordered data, regardless of the underlying type. Jim Robinson had developed indexing schemes for text-based files, which was incorporated into the Tribble library.

## 2. Architecture Overview

Tribble provides a lightweight interface and API for querying features and creating indexes from feature files, while allowing iteration over know feature files that we're unable to create indexes for. The main entry point for external users is the BasicFeatureReader class. It takes in a codec, an index file, and a file containing the features to be processed. With an instance of a BasicFeatureReader, you can query for features that span a specific location, or get an iterator over all the records in the file.

## 3. Developer Overview

For developers, there are two important classes to implement: the FeatureCodec, which decodes lines of text and produces features, and the feature class, which is your underlying record type.

For developers there are two classes that are important:

• Feature

This is the genomicly oriented feature that represents the underlying data in the input file. For instance in the VCF format, this is the variant call including quality information, the reference base, and the alternate base. The required information to implement a feature is the chromosome name, the start position (one based), and the stop position. The start and stop position represent a closed, one-based interval. I.e. the first base in chromosome one would be chr1:1-1.

• FeatureCodec

This class takes in a line of text (from an input source, whether it's a file, compressed file, or a http link), and produces the above feature.

To implement your new format into Tribble, you need to implement the two above classes (in an appropriately named subfolder in the Tribble check-out). The Feature object should know nothing about the file representation; it should represent the data as an in-memory object. The interface for a feature looks like:

public interface Feature {

/**
* Return the features reference sequence name, e.g chromosome or contig
*/
public String getChr();

/**
* Return the start position in 1-based coordinates (first base is 1)
*/
public int getStart();

/**
* Return the end position following 1-based fully closed conventions.  The length of a feature is
* end - start + 1;
*/
public int getEnd();
}


And the interface for FeatureCodec:

/**
* the base interface for classes that read in features.
* @param <T> The feature type this codec reads
*/
public interface FeatureCodec<T extends Feature> {
/**
* Decode a line to obtain just its FeatureLoc for indexing -- contig, start, and stop.
*
* @param line the input line to decode
* @return  Return the FeatureLoc encoded by the line, or null if the line does not represent a feature (e.g. is
* a comment)
*/
public Feature decodeLoc(String line);

/**
* Decode a line as a Feature.
*
* @param line the input line to decode
* @return  Return the Feature encoded by the line,  or null if the line does not represent a feature (e.g. is
* a comment)
*/
public T decode(String line);

/**
* This function returns the object the codec generates.  This is allowed to be Feature in the case where
* conditionally different types are generated.  Be as specific as you can though.
*
* This function is used by reflections based tools, so we can know the underlying type
*
* @return the feature type this codec generates.
*/
public Class<T> getFeatureType();

*
*/
}


## 4. Supported Formats

The following formats are supported in Tribble:

• VCF Format
• DbSNP Format
• BED Format
• GATK Interval Format

## 5. Updating the Tribble, htsjdk, and/or Picard library

Updating the revision of Tribble on the system is a relatively straightforward task if the following steps are taken.

NOTE: Any directory starting with ~ may be different on your machine, depending on where you cloned the various repositories for gsa-unstable, picard, and htsjdk.

A Maven script to install picard into the local repository is located under gsa-unstable/private/picard-maven. To operate, it requires a symbolic link named picard pointing to a working checkout of the picard github repository. NOTE: compiling picard requires an htsjdk github repository checkout available at picard/htsjdk, either as a subdirectory or another symbolic link. The final full path should be gsa-unstable/private/picard-maven/picard/htsjdk.

cd ~/src/gsa-unstable
cd private/picard-maven
ln -s ~/src/picard picard


Create a git branch of Picard and/or htsjdk and make your changes. To install your changes into the GATK you must run mvn install in the private/picard-maven directory. This will compile and copy the jars into gsa-unstable/public/repo, and update gsa-unstable/gatk-root/pom.xml with the corresponding version. While making changes your revision of picard and htslib will be labeled with -SNAPSHOT.

cd ~/src/gsa-unstable
cd private/picard-maven
mvn install


Continue testing in the GATK. Once your changes and updated tests for picard/htsjdk are complete, push your branch and submit your pull request to the Picard and/or htsjdk github. After your Picard/htsjdk patches are accepted, switch your Picard/htsjdk branches back to the master branch. NOTE: Leave your gsa-unstable branch on your development branch!

cd ~/src/picard
ant clean
git checkout master
git fetch
git rebase
cd htsjdk
git checkout master
git fetch
git rebase


NOTE: The version number of old and new Picard/htsjdk will vary, and during active development will end with -SNAPSHOT. While, if needed, you may push -SNAPSHOT version for testing on Bamboo, you should NOT submit a pull request with a -SNAPSHOT version. -SNAPSHOT indicates your local changes are not reproducible from source control.

When ready, run mvn install once more to create the non -SNAPSHOT versions under gsa-unstable/public/repo. In that directory, git add the new version, and git rm the old versions.

cd ~/src/gsa-unstable
cd public/repo
git rm -r picard/picard/1.112.1452/
git rm -r samtools/htsjdk/1.112.1452/


Commit and then push your gsa-unstable branch, then issue a pull request for review.

## 1. Adding walker and package descriptions to the help text

The GATK's build system uses the javadoc parser to extract the javadoc for classes and packages and embed the contents of that javadoc in the help system. If you add Javadoc to your package or walker, it will automatically appear in the help. The javadoc parser will pick up on 'standard' javadoc comments, such as the following, taken from PrintReadsWalker:

/**
* This walker prints out the input reads in SAM format.  Alternatively, the walker can write reads into a specified BAM file.
*/


You can add javadoc to your package by creating a special file, package-info.java, in the package directory. This file should consist of the javadoc for your package plus a package descriptor line. One such example follows:

/**
* @help.display.name Miscellaneous walkers (experimental)
*/


Additionally, the GATK provides two extra custom tags for overriding the information that ultimately makes it into the help.

• @help.display.name Changes the name of the package as it appears in help. Note that the name of the walker cannot be changed as it is required to be passed verbatim to the -T argument.

• @help.summary Changes the description which appears on the right-hand column of the help text. This is useful if you'd like to provide a more concise description of the walker that should appear in the help.

• @help.description Changes the description which appears at the bottom of the help text with -T <your walker> --help is specified. This is useful if you'd like to present a more complete description of your walker.

## 2. Hiding experimental walkers (use sparingly, please!)

Walkers can be hidden from the documentation system by adding the @Hidden annotation to the top of each walker. @Hidden walkers can still be run from the command-line, but their documentation will not be visible to end users. Please use this functionality sparingly to avoid walkers with hidden command-line options that are required for production use.

## 3. Disabling building of help

Because the building of our help text is actually heavyweight and can dramatically increase compile time on some systems, we have a mechanism to disable help generation.

Compile with the following command:

ant -Ddisable.help=true


to disable generation of help.

This script can be used for sorting an input file based on a reference.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Getopt::Long;

sub usage {

print "\nUsage:\n";
print "sortByRef.pl [--k POS] INPUT REF_DICT\n\n";

print " Sorts lines of the input file INFILE according\n";
print " to the reference contig order specified by the\n";
print " reference dictionary REF_DICT (.fai file).\n";
print " The sort is stable. If -k option is not specified,\n";
print " it is assumed that the contig name is the first\n";
print " field in each line.\n\n";
print "  INPUT      input file to sort. If '-' is specified, \n";
print "             then reads from STDIN.\n";
print "  REF_DICT   .fai file, or ANY file that has contigs, in the\n";
print "             desired soting order, as its first column.\n";
print "  --k POS :  contig name is in the field POS (1-based)\n";
print "             of input lines.\n\n";

exit(1);
}

my $pos = 1; GetOptions( "k:i" => \$pos );

$pos--; usage() if ( scalar(@ARGV) == 0 ); if ( scalar(@ARGV) != 2 ) { print "Wrong number of arguments\n"; usage(); } my$input_file = $ARGV[0]; my$dict_file = $ARGV[1]; open(DICT, "<$dict_file") or die("Can not open $dict_file:$!");

my %ref_order;

my $n = 0; while ( <DICT> ) { chomp; my ($contig, $rest) = split "\t"; die("Dictionary file is probably corrupt: multiple instances of contig$contig") if ( defined $ref_order{$contig} );

$ref_order{$contig} = $n;$n++;
}

close DICT;
#we have loaded contig ordering now

my $INPUT; if ($input_file eq "-" ) {
$INPUT = "STDIN"; } else { open($INPUT, "< $input_file") or die("Can not open$input_file: $!"); } my %temp_outputs; while ( <$INPUT> ) {

my @fields = split '\s';
die("Specified field position exceeds the number of fields:\n$_") if ($pos >= scalar(@fields) );

my $contig =$fields[$pos]; if ($contig =~ m/:/ ) {
my @loc = split(/:/, $contig); # print$contig . " " . $loc[0] . "\n";$contig = $loc[0] } chomp$contig if ( $pos == scalar(@fields) - 1 ); # if last field in line my$order;
if ( defined $ref_order{$contig} ) { $order =$ref_order{$contig}; } else {$order = $n; # input line has contig that was not in the dict;$n++; # this contig will go at the end of the output,
# after all known contigs
}

my $fhandle; if ( defined$temp_outputs{$order} ) {$fhandle = $temp_outputs{$order} }
else {
#print "opening $order $$_\n"; open( fhandle, " > /tmp/sortByRef.$$.$order.tmp" ) or
die ( "Can not open temporary file $order:$!");
$temp_outputs{$order} = $fhandle; } # we got the handle to the temp file that keeps all # lines with contig$contig

print $fhandle$_; # send current line to its corresponding temp file
}

close $INPUT; foreach my$f ( values %temp_outputs ) { close $f; } # now collect back into single output stream: for ( my$i = 0 ; $i <$n ; $i++ ) { # if we did not have any lines on contig$i, then there's
# no temp file and nothing to do
next if ( ! defined $temp_outputs{$i} ) ;

my $f; open ($f, "< /tmp/sortByRef.$$.i.tmp" ); while ( <f> ) { print ; } close f; unlink "/tmp/sortByRef.$$.i.tmp"; }  ### 1. Introduction The GATK provides an implementation of the Per-Base Alignment Qualities (BAQ) developed by Heng Li in late 2010. See this SamTools page for more details. ### 2. Using BAQ The BAQ algorithm is applied by the GATK engine itself, which means that all GATK walkers can potentially benefit from it. By default, BAQ is OFF, meaning that the engine will not use BAQ quality scores at all. The GATK engine accepts the argument -baq with the following enum values: public enum CalculationMode { OFF, // don't apply a BAQ at all, the default CALCULATE_AS_NECESSARY, // do HMM BAQ calculation on the fly, as necessary, if there's no tag RECALCULATE // do HMM BAQ calculation on the fly, regardless of whether there's a tag present }  If you want to enable BAQ, the usual thing to do is CALCULATE_AS_NECESSARY, which will calculate BAQ values if they are not in the BQ read tag. If your reads are already tagged with BQ values, then the GATK will use those. RECALCULATE will always recalculate the BAQ, regardless of the tag, which is useful if you are experimenting with the gap open penalty (see below). If you are really an expert, the GATK allows you to specify the BAQ gap open penalty (-baqGOP) to use in the HMM. This value should be 40 by default, a good value for whole genomes and exomes for highly sensitive calls. However, if you are analyzing exome data only, you may want to use 30, which seems to result in more specific call set. We continue to play with these values some. Some walkers, where BAQ would corrupt their analyses, forbid the use of BAQ and will throw an exception if -baq is provided. ### 3. Some example uses of the BAQ in the GATK • For UnifiedGenotyper to get more specific SNP calls. • For PrintReads to write out a BAM file with BAQ tagged reads • For TableRecalibrator or IndelRealigner to write out a BAM file with BAQ tagged reads. Make sure you use -baq RECALCULATE so the engine knows to recalculate the BAQ after these tools have updated the base quality scores or the read alignments. Note that both of these tools will not use the BAQ values on input, but will write out the tags for analysis tools that will use them. Note that some tools should not have BAQ applied to them. This last option will be a particularly useful for people who are already doing base quality score recalibration. Suppose I have a pipeline that does: RealignerTargetCreator IndelRealigner BaseRecalibrator PrintReads (with --BQSR input) UnifiedGenotyper  A highly efficient BAQ extended pipeline would look like RealignerTargetCreator IndelRealigner // don't bother with BAQ here, since we will calculate it in table recalibrator BaseRecalibrator PrintReads (with --BQSR input) -baq RECALCULATE // now the reads will have a BAQ tag added. Slows the tool down some UnifiedGenotyper -baq CALCULATE_AS_NECESSARY // UG will use the tags from TableRecalibrate, keeping UG fast  ### 4. BAQ and walker control Walkers can control via the @BAQMode annotation how the BAQ calculation is applied. Can either be as a tag, by overwriting the qualities scores, or by only returning the baq-capped qualities scores. Additionally, walkers can be set up to have the BAQ applied to the incoming reads (ON_INPUT, the default), to output reads (ON_OUTPUT), or HANDLED_BY_WALKER, which means that calling into the BAQ system is the responsibility of the individual walker. The GATKDocs are what we call "Technical Documentation" in the Guide section of this website. The HTML pages are generated automatically at build time from specific blocks of documentation in the source code. The best place to look for example documentation for a GATK walker is GATKDocsExample walker in org.broadinstitute.sting.gatk.examples. This is available here. Below is the reproduction of that file from August 11, 2011: /** * [Short one sentence description of this walker] * * <p> * [Functionality of this walker] * </p> * * <h2>Input</h2> * <p> * [Input description] * </p> * * <h2>Output</h2> * <p> * [Output description] * </p> * * <h2>Examples</h2> * PRE-TAG * java * -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar * -TWalkerName
* PRE-TAG
*
* @category Walker Category
* @since Date created
*/
public class GATKDocsExample extends RodWalker<Integer, Integer> {
/**
* Put detailed documentation about the argument here.  No need to duplicate the summary information
* in doc annotation field, as that will be added before this text in the documentation page.
*
* Notes:
* <ul>
*     <li>This field can contain HTML as a normal javadoc</li>
*     <li>Don't include information about the default value, as gatkdocs adds this automatically</li>
*     <li>Try your best to describe in detail the behavior of the argument, as ultimately confusing
*          docs here will just result in user posts on the forum</li>
* </ul>
*/
@Argument(fullName="full", shortName="short", doc="Brief summary of argument [~ 80 characters of text]", required=false)
private boolean myWalkerArgument = false;

public Integer map(RefMetaDataTracker tracker, ReferenceContext ref, AlignmentContext context) { return 0; }
public Integer reduceInit() { return 0; }
public Integer reduce(Integer value, Integer sum) { return value + sum; }
public void onTraversalDone(Integer result) { }
}


### 1. Introduction

Reads can be filtered out of traversals by either pileup size through one of our downsampling methods or by read property through our read filtering mechanism. Both techniques and described below.

### 2. Downsampling

Normal sequencing and alignment protocols can often yield pileups with vast numbers of reads aligned to a single section of the genome in otherwise well-behaved datasets. Because of the frequency of these 'speed bumps', the GATK now downsamples pileup data unless explicitly overridden.

#### Defaults

The GATK's default downsampler exhibits the following properties:

• The downsampler treats data from each sample independently, so that high coverage in one sample won't negatively impact calling in other samples.

• The downsampler attempts to downsample uniformly across the range spanned by the reads in the pileup.

• The downsampler's memory consumption is proportional to the sampled coverage depth rather than the full coverage depth.

By default, the downsampler is limited to 1000 reads per sample. This value can be adjusted either per-walker or per-run.

#### Customizing

From the command line:

• To disable the downsampler, specify -dt NONE.

• To change the default coverage per-sample, specify the desired coverage to the -dcov option.

To modify the walker's default behavior:

• Add the @Downsample interface to the top of your walker. Override the downsampling type by changing the by=<value>. Override the downsampling depth by changing the toCoverage=<value>.

#### Algorithm details

The downsampler algorithm is designed to maintain uniform coverage while preserving a low memory footprint in regions of especially deep data. Given an already established pileup, a single-base locus, and a pile of reads with an alignment start of single-base locus + 1, the outline of the algorithm is as follows:

For each sample:

• Select reads with the next alignment start.

• While the number of existing reads + the number of incoming reads is greater than the target sample size:

Walk backward through each set of reads having the same alignment start. If the count of reads having the same alignment start is > 1, throw out one randomly selected read.

• If we have n slots avaiable where n is >= 1, randomly select n of the incoming reads and add them to the pileup.

• Otherwise, we have zero slots available. Choose the read from the existing pileup with the least alignment start. Throw it out and add one randomly selected read from the new pileup.

To selectively filter out reads before they reach your walker, implement one or multiple net.sf.picard.filter.SamRecordFilter, and attach it to your walker as follows:

@ReadFilters({Platform454Filter.class, ZeroMappingQualityReadFilter.class})


### 4. Command-line arguments for read filters

You can add command-line arguments for filters with the @Argument tag, just as with walkers. Here's an example of our new max read length filter:

public class MaxReadLengthFilter implements SamRecordFilter {

}


Adding this filter to the top of your walker using the @ReadFilters attribute will add a new required command-line argument, maxReadLength, which will filter reads > maxReadLength before your walker is called.

Note that when you specify a read filter, you need to strip the Filter part of its name off! E.g. in the example above, if you want to use MaxReadLengthFilter, you need to call it like this:

--read_filter MaxReadLength


### 5. Adding filters dynamically using command-line arguments

The --read-filter argument will allow you to apply whatever read filters you'd like to your dataset, before the reads reach your walker. To add the MaxReadLength filter above to PrintReads, you'd add the command line parameters:

--read_filter MaxReadLength --maxReadLength 76


You can add as many filters as you like by using multiple copies of the --read_filter parameter:

--read_filter MaxReadLength --maxReadLength 76 --read_filter ZeroMappingQualityRead


## New WGS and WEx CEU trio BAM files

We have sequenced at the Broad Institute and released to the 1000 Genomes Project the following datasets for the three members of the CEU trio (NA12878, NA12891 and NA12892):

• WEx (150x) sequence
• WGS (>60x) sequence

This is better data to work with than the original DePristo et al. BAMs files, so we recommend you download and analyze these files if you are looking for complete, large-scale data sets to evaluate the GATK or other tools.

Here's the rough library properties of the BAMs:

## NA12878 Datasets from DePristo et al. (2011) Nature Genetics

Here are the datasets we used in the GATK paper cited below.

DePristo M, Banks E, Poplin R, Garimella K, Maguire J, Hartl C, Philippakis A, del Angel G, Rivas MA, Hanna M, McKenna A, Fennell T, Kernytsky A, Sivachenko A, Cibulskis K, Gabriel S, Altshuler D and Daly, M (2011). A framework for variation discovery and genotyping using next-generation DNA sequencing data. Nature Genetics. 43:491-498.

Some of the BAM and VCF files are currently hosted by the NCBI: ftp://ftp-trace.ncbi.nih.gov/1000genomes/ftp/technical/working/20101201_cg_NA12878/

• NA12878.hiseq.wgs.bwa.recal.bam -- BAM file for NA12878 HiSeq whole genome
• NA12878.hiseq.wgs.bwa.raw.bam Raw reads (in BAM format, see below)
• NA12878.ga2.exome.maq.recal.bam -- BAM file for NA12878 GenomeAnalyzer II whole exome (hg18)
• NA12878.ga2.exome.maq.raw.bam Raw reads (in BAM format, see below)
• NA12878.hiseq.wgs.vcf.gz -- SNP calls for NA12878 HiSeq whole genome (hg18)
• NA12878.ga2.exome.vcf.gz -- SNP calls for NA12878 GenomeAnalyzer II whole exome (hg18)
• BAM files for CEU + NA12878 whole genome (b36). These are the standard BAM files for the 1000 Genomes pilot CEU samples plus a 4x downsampled version of NA12878 from the pilot 2 data set, available in the DePristoNatGenet2011 directory of the GSA FTP Server
• SNP calls for CEU + NA12878 whole genome (b36) are available in the DePristoNatGenet2011 directory of the GSA FTP Server
• Crossbow comparison SNP calls are available in the DePristoNatGenet2011 directory of the GSA FTP Server as crossbow.filtered.vcf. The raw calls can be viewed by ignoring the FILTER field status
• whole_exome_agilent_designed_120.Homo_sapiens_assembly18.targets.interval_list -- targets used in the analysis of the exome capture data

Please note that we have not collected the indel calls for the paper, as these are only used for filtering SNPs near indels. If you want to call accurate indels, please use the new GATK indel caller in the Unified Genotyper.

### Warnings

Both the GATK and the sequencing technologies have improved significantly since the analyses performed in this paper.

• If you are conducting a review today, we would recommend that the newest version of the GATK, which performs much better than the version described in the paper. Moreover, we would also recommend one use the newest version of Crossbow as well, in case they have improved things. The GATK calls for NA12878 from the paper (above) will give one a good idea what a good call set looks like whole-genome or whole-exome.

• The data sets used in the paper are no longer state-of-the-art. The WEx BAM is GAII data aligned with MAQ on hg18, but a state-of-the-art data set would use HiSeq and BWA on hg19. Even the 64x HiSeq WG data set is already more than one year old. For a better assessment, we would recommend you use a newer data set for these samples, if you have the capacity to generate it. This applies less to the WG NA12878 data, which is pretty good, but the NA12878 WEx from the paper is nearly 2 years old now and notably worse than our most recent data sets.

Obviously, this was an annoyance for us as well, as it would have been nice to use a state-of-the-art data set for the WEx. But we decided to freeze the data used for analysis to actually finish this paper.

### How do I get the raw FASTQ file from a BAM?

If you want the raw, machine output for the data analyzed in the GATK framework paper, obtain the raw BAM files above and convert them from SAM to FASTQ using the Picard tool SamToFastq.

The GATK is an open source project that has greatly benefited from the contributions of outside users. The GATK team welcomes contributions from anyone who produces useful functionality in line with the goals of the toolkit. You are welcome to branch the GATK main repository and develop your own tools. Sometimes these tools may be useful to the GATK user community and you may want to make it part of the main GATK distribution. If so we ask you to follow our guidelines for submission of patches.

### 1. Good practices

There are a few good GIT practices that you should follow to simplify the ultimate goal, which is, adding your changes to the main GATK repository.

• Use branches.
Every time you start new work that you are going to submit to the GATK team later, do it in a new branch. Make it a habit as this will simplify many of the following procedures and allow your master branch to always be a fresh (up to date) copy of the GATK main repository. Take a look on [[#How to create a new submission| how to create a new branch for submission]].
• Never merge.
Merging creates a branched history with multiple parent nodes that make history hard to understand, impossible to modify and patches near-impossible to create. Merges are very useful when you need to combine multiple repositories and it should ''only'' be used when it makes sense. This means '''never merge''' and '''never pull''' (if it's not a fast-forward, or you will create a merge).
• Commit as often as possible.
Every change, should be committed to make sure you can go back in time effectively in your own tree. The commit messages don't matter to us as long as they're meaningful to you in this stage. You can essentially do whatever you want in your local tree with your commits, as long as you don't merge.
• Rebase constantly
Your branch is diverging from the master by the minute, so if you keep rebasing as often as you can, you will avoid major conflicts when it's time to send the patches. Take a look at our guide on [[#How to rebase | how to rebase]].
• Tell a meaningful story
When it's time to submit your patches to us, reorder your commits and write meaningful commit messages. Each commit must be (as much as possible) self contained. These commits must tell a meaningful story to us so we can understand what it is you're adding to the codebase. Take a look at an [[#How to make your commits | example commit scenario]].
• Generate patches and email them to the group
This part is super easy, provided you've followed the good practices. You just have to [[#How to generate the patches | generate the patches]] and e-mail them to gsa-patches@broadinstitute.org.

### 2. How to create a new submission

You should always start your code by creating a new branch from the most recent version of the main repository with :

git checkout master                       (make sure you are in the master branch)
git fetch && git rebase origin/master     (you can substitute this line for "git pull" if you have no changes in the master branch)
git checkout -b newtool                   (create a new branch for your new tool)


Note: If you have submitted a patch to the group, do not continue development on the same branch as we cannot guarantee that your changes will make it to the main repository unchanged.

### 3. How to rebase

Every time before you rebase, you have to update your copy of the main repository. To do this use:

git fetch


If you are just trying to keep up with the changes in the main repository after a fetch, you can rebase your branch at anytime using (and this should be all you need to do):

git rebase origin/master


In case there are conflicts, resolve them as you would and do:

git rebase --continue


If you don't know how to resolve the conflicts, you can always safely abort the whole process and go back to your branch before you started rebasing:

git rebase --abort


If you are done and want to generate your patches conforming to the latest repository changes, to edit, squash and reorder your commits use :

git rebase -i origin/master


At the prompt, you can follow the instructions to squash, edit and reorder accordingly. You can also do this step from IntelliJ with a visual editor that allows you to select what to edit/squash/reorder. You can also take a look at this nice tutorial on how to use interactive rebase.

### 4. How to make your commits

It is okay to have a list of commits (numbered) somewhat like this in your local tree:

• fixed a b and c on X
• b was actually d
• started creating feature Y but had to go to the bathroom
• found bug in X, fixed with e
• fixed bug in Z with f

Before you can send your tools to us, you have to organize these commits so they tell a meaningful history and are self contained. To achieve this you will need to rebase so you can squash, edit and reorder your commits. This tree makes a lot of sense for your development process, but it makes no sense in the main repository history as it becomes hard to pick/revert commits and understand the history at a glance. After rebasing, you should edit your commits to look like this:

• added X (including commits 2, 3 and 6)
• added Y (including commits 4 and 5)
• added Z (including commits 7 and 8)

Use your commit messages wisely to help quick processing of your patches. Make sure the first line of your commit messages have less than 50 characters (title). Add a blank line and write a paragraph or more explaining what this commit represents (now that it is a package of multiple commits. It is important to have the 50 char title because this is all we see when we look at an extended history to find bugs and it is also our quick access to remember what the commit does to the repository.

A patch should be self contained. Meaning if we decide to adopt feature X and Z but not Y, we should be able to do so by only applying patches 1 and 2. If your patches are co-dependent, you should say so in the commits and justify why you didn't squash the commits together into one tool.

### 5. How to generate the patches

To generate patches, use :

git format-patch since


The since parameter is the last commit you want to generate patches from, for example: HEAD^3 will generate patches for HEAD^2, HEAD^1 and HEAD. You can also specify the commit by its id or by using the head of a branch. This is where using branches will make your life easier. If master is always up to date with the main repo with no changes, you can do:

git format-patch master   (provided your master is up to date)


This will generate a patch for each commit you've created and you can simply e-mail them as an attachment to us.

### 1. JEXL in a nutshell

JEXL stands for Java EXpression Language. It's not a part of the GATK as such; it's a software library that can be used by Java-based programs like the GATK. It can be used for many things, but in the context of the GATK, it has one very specific use: making it possible to operate on subsets of variants from VCF files based on one or more annotations, using a single command. This is typically done with walkers such as VariantFiltration and SelectVariants.

### 2. Basic structure of JEXL expressions for use with the GATK

In this context, a JEXL expression is a string (in the computing sense, i.e. a series of characters) that tells the GATK which annotations to look at and what selection rules to apply.

JEXL expressions contain three basic components: keys and values, connected by operators. For example, in this simple JEXL expression which selects variants whose quality score is greater than 30:

"QUAL > 30.0"

• QUAL is a key: the name of the annotation we want to look at
• 30.0 is a value: the threshold that we want to use to evaluate variant quality against
• > is an operator: it determines which "side" of the threshold we want to select

The complete expression must be framed by double quotes. Within this, keys are strings (typically written in uppercase or CamelCase), and values can be either strings, numbers or booleans (TRUE or FALSE) -- but if they are strings the values must be framed by single quotes, as in the following example:

"MY_STRING_KEY == 'foo'"


### 3. Evaluation on multiple annotations

You can build expressions that calculate a metric based on two separate annotations, for example if you want to select variants for which quality (QUAL) divided by depth of coverage (DP) is below a certain threshold value:

"QUAL / DP < 10.0"


You can also join multiple conditional statements with logical operators, for example if you want to select variants that have both sufficient quality (QUAL) and a certain depth of coverage (DP):

"QUAL > 30.0 && DP == 10"


where && is the logical "AND".

Or if you want to select variants that have at least one of several conditions fulfilled:

"QD < 2.0 || ReadPosRankSum < -20.0 || FS > 200.0"


where || is the logical "OR".

### 4. Important caveats

#### Sensitivity to case and type

• Case

Currently, VCF INFO field keys are case-sensitive. That means that if you have a QUAL field in uppercase in your VCF record, the system will not recognize it if you write it differently (Qual, qual or whatever) in your JEXL expression.

• Type

The types (i.e. string, integer, non-integer or boolean) used in your expression must be exactly the same as that of the value you are trying to evaluate. In other words, if you have a QUAL field with non-integer values (e.g. 45.3) and your filter expression is written as an integer (e.g. "QUAL < 50"), the system will throw a hissy fit (aka a Java exception).

#### Complex queries

We highly recommend that complex expressions involving multiple AND/OR operations be split up into separate expressions whenever possible to avoid confusion. If you are using complex expressions, make sure to test them on a panel of different sites with several combinations of yes/no criteria.

### 5. More complex JEXL magic

Note that this last part is fairly advanced and not for the faint of heart. To be frank, it's also explained rather more briefly than the topic deserves. But if there's enough demand for this level of usage (click the "view in forum" link and leave a comment) we'll consider producing a full-length tutorial.

#### Introducing the VariantContext object

When you use SelectVariants with JEXL, what happens under the hood is that the program accesses something called the VariantContext, which is a representation of the variant call with all its annotation information. The VariantContext is technically not part of GATK; it's part of the variant library included within the Picard tools source code, which GATK uses for convenience.

The reason we're telling you about this is that you can actually make more complex queries than what the GATK offers convenience functions for, provided you're willing to do a little digging into the VariantContext methods. This will allow you to leverage the full range of capabilities of the underlying objects from the command line.

In a nutshell, the VariantContext is available through the vc variable, and you just need to add method calls to that variable in your command line. The bets way to find out what methods are available is to read the VariantContext documentation on the Picard tools source code repository (on SourceForge), but we list a few examples below to whet your appetite.

#### Examples using VariantContext directly

For example, suppose I want to use SelectVariants to select all of the sites where sample NA12878 is homozygous-reference. This can be accomplished by assessing the underlying VariantContext as follows:

java -Xmx4g -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T SelectVariants -R b37/human_g1k_v37.fasta --variant my.vcf -select 'vc.getGenotype("NA12878").isHomRef()'


Groovy, right? Now here's a more sophisticated example of JEXL expression that finds all novel variants in the total set with allele frequency > 0.25 but not 1, is not filtered, and is non-reference in 01-0263 sample:

! vc.getGenotype("01-0263").isHomRef() && (vc.getID() == null || vc.getID().equals(".")) && AF > 0.25 && AF < 1.0 && vc.isNotFiltered() && vc.isSNP() -o 01-0263.high_freq_novels.vcf -sn 01-0263


#### Examples using the VariantContext to evaluate boolean values

The classic way of evaluating a boolean goes like this:

java -Xmx4g -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T SelectVariants -R b37/human_g1k_v37.fasta --variant my.vcf -select 'DB'


But you can also use the VariantContext object like this:

java -Xmx4g -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T SelectVariants -R b37/human_g1k_v37.fasta --variant my.vcf -select 'vc.hasAttribute("DB")'


#### Example using JEXL to evaluate arrays

Sometimes you might want to write a JEXL expression to evaluate e.g. the AD (allelic depth) field in the FORMAT column. However, the AD is technically not an integer; rather it is a list (array) of integers. One can evaluate the array data using the "." operator. Here's an example:

java -Xmx4g -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T SelectVariants -R b37/human_g1k_v37.fasta --variant my.vcf -select 'vc.getGenotype("NA12878").getAD().0 > 10'


### 1. What it is and how it helps us improve the GATK

Since September, 2010, the GATK has had a "phone-home" feature that sends us information about each GATK run via the Broad filesystem (within the Broad) and Amazon's S3 cloud storage service (outside the Broad). This feature is enabled by default.

The information provided by the phone-home feature is critical in driving improvements to the GATK

• By recording detailed information about each error that occurs, it enables GATK developers to identify and fix previously-unknown bugs in the GATK. We are constantly monitoring the errors our users encounter and do our best to fix those errors that are caused by bugs in our code.
• It allows us to better understand how the GATK is used in practice and adjust our documentation and development goals for common use cases.
• It gives us a picture of which versions of the GATK are in use over time, and how successful we've been at encouraging users to migrate from obsolete or broken versions of the GATK to newer, improved versions.
• It tells us which tools are most commonly used, allowing us to monitor the adoption of newly-released tools and abandonment of outdated tools.
• It provides us with a sense of the overall size of our user base and the major organizations/institutions using the GATK.

### 2. What information is sent to us

Below are two example GATK Run Reports showing exactly what information is sent to us each time the GATK phones home.

#### A successful run:

<GATK-run-report>
<id>D7D31ULwTSxlAwnEOSmW6Z4PawXwMxEz</id>
<start-time>2012/03/10 20.21.19</start-time>
<end-time>2012/03/10 20.21.19</end-time>
<run-time>0</run-time>
<svn-version>1.4-483-g63ecdb2</svn-version>
<total-memory>85000192</total-memory>
<max-memory>129957888</max-memory>
<user-name>depristo</user-name>
<host-name>10.0.1.10</host-name>
<java>Apple Inc.-1.6.0_26</java>
<machine>Mac OS X-x86_64</machine>
<iterations>105</iterations>
</GATK-run-report>


#### A run where an exception has occurred:

<GATK-run-report>
<id>yX3AnltsqIlXH9kAQqTWHQUd8CQ5bikz</id>
<exception>
<message>Failed to parse Genome Location string: 20:10,000,000-10,000,001x</message>
<stacktrace class="java.util.ArrayList">
</stacktrace>
<cause>
<message>Position: &apos;10,000,001x&apos; contains invalid chars.</message>
<stacktrace class="java.util.ArrayList">
</stacktrace>
<is-user-exception>false</is-user-exception>
</cause>
<is-user-exception>true</is-user-exception>
</exception>
<start-time>2012/03/10 20.19.52</start-time>
<end-time>2012/03/10 20.19.52</end-time>
<run-time>0</run-time>
<svn-version>1.4-483-g63ecdb2</svn-version>
<total-memory>85000192</total-memory>
<max-memory>129957888</max-memory>
<user-name>depristo</user-name>
<host-name>10.0.1.10</host-name>
<java>Apple Inc.-1.6.0_26</java>
<machine>Mac OS X-x86_64</machine>
<iterations>0</iterations>
</GATK-run-report>


Note that as of GATK 1.5 we no longer collect information about the command-line executed, the working directory, or tmp directory.

### 3. Disabling Phone Home

The GATK is currently in the process of evolving to require interaction with Amazon S3 as a normal part of each run. For this reason, and because the information contained in the GATK run reports is so critical in driving improvements to the GATK, we strongly discourage our users from disabling the phone-home feature.

At the same time, we recognize that some of our users do have legitimate reasons for needing to run the GATK with phone-home disabled, and we don't wish to make it impossible for these users to run the GATK.

#### Examples of legitimate reasons for disabling Phone Home

• Technical reasons: Your local network might have restrictions in place that don't allow the GATK to access external resources, or you might need to run the GATK in a network-less environment.

• Organizational reasons: Your organization's policies might forbid the dissemination of one or more pieces of information contained in the GATK run report.

For such users we have provided an -et NO_ET option in the GATK to disable the phone-home feature. To use this option in GATK 1.5 and later, you need to contact us to request a key. Instructions for doing so are below.

#### How to obtain and use a GATK key

To obtain a GATK key, please fill out the request form.

Running the GATK with a key is simple: you just need to append a -K your.key argument to your customary command line, where your.key is the path to the key file you obtained from us:

java -jar dist/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \
-I public/testdata/exampleBAM.bam \
-R public/testdata/exampleFASTA.fasta \
-et NO_ET \
-K your.key


The -K argument is only necessary when running the GATK with the NO_ET option.

#### Troubleshooting key-related problems

If you get an error message from the GATK saying that your key is corrupt, unreadable, or has been revoked, please email '''gsahelp@broadinstitute.org''' to ask for a replacement key.

If you get an error message stating that the GATK public key could not be located or read, then something is likely wrong with your build of the GATK. If you're running the binary release, try downloading it again. If you're compiling from source, try doing an ant clean and re-compiling. If all else fails, please ask for help on our community forum.

### What does GSA use Phone Home data for?

We use the phone home data for three main purposes. First, we monitor the input logs for errors that occur in the GATK, and proactively fix them in the codebase. Second, we monitor the usage rates of the GATK in general and specific versions of the GATK to explain how widely used the GATK is to funding agencies and other potential supporters. Finally, we monitor adoption rates of specific GATK tools to understand how quickly new tools reach our users. Many of these analyses require us to aggregate the data by unique user, which is why we still collect the username of the individual who ran the GATK (as you can see in the plots). Examples of all three uses are shown in the Tableau graphs below, which update each night and are sent to the GATK members each morning for review.

### 1. Notes on known sites

#### Why are they important?

Each tool uses known sites differently, but what is common to all is that they use them to help distinguish true variants from false positives, which is very important to how these tools work. If you don't provide known sites, the statistical analysis of the data will be skewed, which can dramatically affect the sensitivity and reliability of the results.

In the variant calling pipeline, the only tools that do not strictly require known sites are UnifiedGenotyper and HaplotypeCaller.

#### Human genomes

If you're working on human genomes, you're in luck. We provide sets of known sites in the human genome as part of our resource bundle, and we can give you specific Best Practices recommendations on which sets to use for each tool in the variant calling pipeline. See the next section for details.

#### Non-human genomes

If you're working on genomes of other organisms, things may be a little harder -- but don't panic, we'll try to help as much as we can. We've started a community discussion in the forum on What are the standard resources for non-human genomes? in which we hope people with non-human genomics experience will share their knowledge.

And if it turns out that there is as yet no suitable set of known sites for your organisms, here's how to make your own for the purposes of BaseRecalibration: First, do an initial round of SNP calling on your original, unrecalibrated data. Then take the SNPs that you have the highest confidence in and use that set as the database of known SNPs by feeding it as a VCF file to the base quality score recalibrator. Finally, do a real round of SNP calling with the recalibrated data. These steps could be repeated several times until convergence. Good luck!

Some experimentation will be required to figure out the best way to find the highest confidence SNPs for use here. Perhaps one could call variants with several different calling algorithms and take the set intersection. Or perhaps one could do a very strict round of filtering and take only those variants which pass the test.

### 2. Recommended sets of known sites per tool

#### Summary table

Tool dbSNP 129 - - dbSNP >132 - - Mills indels - - 1KG indels - - HapMap - - Omni
RealignerTargetCreator X X
IndelRealigner X X
BaseRecalibrator X X X
(UnifiedGenotyper/ HaplotypeCaller) X
VariantRecalibrator X X X X
VariantEval X

#### RealignerTargetCreator and IndelRealigner

These tools require known indels passed with the -known argument to function properly. We use both the following files:

• Mills_and_1000G_gold_standard.indels.b37.sites.vcf
• 1000G_phase1.indels.b37.vcf (currently from the 1000 Genomes Phase I indel calls)

#### BaseRecalibrator

This tool requires known SNPs and indels passed with the -knownSites argument to function properly. We use all the following files:

• The most recent dbSNP release (build ID > 132)
• Mills_and_1000G_gold_standard.indels.b37.sites.vcf
• 1000G_phase1.indels.b37.vcf (currently from the 1000 Genomes Phase I indel calls)

#### UnifiedGenotyper / HaplotypeCaller

These tools do NOT require known sites, but if SNPs are provided with the -dbsnp argument they will use them for variant annotation. We use this file:

• The most recent dbSNP release (build ID > 132)

#### VariantRecalibrator

For VariantRecalibrator, please see the FAQ article on VQSR training sets and arguments.

#### VariantEval

This tool requires known SNPs passed with the -dbsnp argument to function properly. We use the following file:

• A version of dbSNP subsetted to only sites discovered in or before dbSNP BuildID 129, which excludes the impact of the 1000 Genomes project and is useful for evaluation of dbSNP rate and Ti/Tv values at novel sites.

A GATKReport is simply a text document that contains well-formatted, easy to read representation of some tabular data. Many GATK tools output their results as GATKReports, so it's important to understand how they are formatted and how you can use them in further analyses.

Here's a simple example:

#:GATKReport.v1.0:2
#:GATKTable:true:2:9:%.18E:%.15f:;
#:GATKTable:ErrorRatePerCycle:The error rate per sequenced position in the reads
cycle  errorrate.61PA8.7         qualavg.61PA8.7
0      7.451835696110506E-3      25.474613284804366
1      2.362777171937477E-3      29.844949954504095
2      9.087604507451836E-4      32.875909752547310
3      5.452562704471102E-4      34.498999090081895
4      9.087604507451836E-4      35.148316651501370
5      5.452562704471102E-4      36.072234352256190
6      5.452562704471102E-4      36.121724890829700
7      5.452562704471102E-4      36.191048034934500
8      5.452562704471102E-4      36.003457059679770

#:GATKTable:false:2:3:%s:%c:;
#:GATKTable:TableName:Description
key    column
1:1000  T
1:1001  A
1:1002  C


This report contains two individual GATK report tables. Every table begins with a header for its metadata and then a header for its name and description. The next row contains the column names followed by the data.

We provide an R library called gsalib that allows you to load GATKReport files into R for further analysis. Here are four simple steps to getting gsalib, installing it and loading a report.

$R R version 2.11.0 (2010-04-22) Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing ISBN 3-900051-07-0 R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details. Natural language support but running in an English locale R is a collaborative project with many contributors. Type 'contributors()' for more information and 'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications. Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or 'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help. Type 'q()' to quit R.  #### 2. Get the gsalib library from CRAN The gsalib library is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network, so you can just do: > install.packages("gsalib")  From within R (we use RStudio for convenience). In some cases you need to explicitly tell R where to find the library; you can do this as follows: $ cat .Rprofile
.libPaths("/path/to/Sting/R/")


#### 3. Load the gsalib library

> library(gsalib)


#### 4. Finally, load the GATKReport file and have fun

> d = gsa.read.gatkreport("/path/to/my.gatkreport")
> summary(d)
Length Class      Mode
CountVariants 27     data.frame list
CompOverlap   13     data.frame list


Just because something looks like a SNP in IGV doesn't mean that it is of high quality. We are extremely confident in the genotype likelihoods calculations in the Unified Genotyper (especially for SNPs) and in the HaplotypeCaller (for all variants including indels). So, before you post this issue in our support forum, please do a little bit of investigation on your own, as follows.

To diagnose what is happening, you should take a look at the pileup of bases at the position in question. It is very important for you to look at the underlying data here.

Here is a checklist of questions you should ask yourself:

• How many overlapping deletions are there at the position?

The genotyper ignores sites if there are too many overlapping deletions. This value can be set using the --max_deletion_fraction argument (see the UG's documentation page to find out what is the default value for this argument), but be aware that increasing it could affect the reliability of your results.

• What do the base qualities look like for the non-reference bases?

Remember that there is a minimum base quality threshold and that low base qualities mean that the sequencer assigned a low confidence to that base. If your would-be SNP is only supported by low-confidence bases, it is probably a false positive.

Keep in mind that the depth reported in the VCF is the unfiltered depth. You may think you have good coverage at that site, but the Unified Genotyper ignores bases if they don't look good, so actual coverage seen by the UG may be lower than you think.

• What do the mapping qualities look like for the reads with the non-reference bases?

A base's quality is capped by the mapping quality of its read. The reason for this is that low mapping qualities mean that the aligner had little confidence that the read is mapped to the correct location in the genome. You may be seeing mismatches because the read doesn't belong there -- you may be looking at the sequence of some other locus in the genome!

Keep in mind also that reads with mapping quality 255 ("unknown") are ignored.

• Are there a lot of alternate alleles?

By default the UG will only consider a certain number of alternate alleles. This value can be set using the --max_alternate_alleles argument (see the UG's documentation page to find out what is the default value for this argument). Note however that genotyping sites with many alternate alleles is both CPU and memory intensive and it scales exponentially based on the number of alternate alleles. Unless there is a good reason to change the default value, we highly recommend that you not play around with this parameter.

• Are you working with SOLiD data?

SOLiD alignments tend to have reference bias and it can be severe in some cases. Do the SOLiD reads have a lot of mismatches (no-calls count as mismatches) around the the site? If so, you are probably seeing false positives.

• Specifically for Haplotype Caller

In addition to the reasons above, Haplotype Caller has another reason why some variants do not get called when it seems obvious in the original bam file.

Haplotype Caller performs a local reassembly of the reads in the active region. Please refer here for more details: http://www.broadinstitute.org/gatk/guide/article?id=4148

This reassembly is important, because when mapping reads to the whole genome, it is easy to make an error. When reassembling reads in a much smaller region, such as the active region, the alignment is more likely to be accurate.

The reads you see in the alignment of the original bam file may suggest a variant should be called. However, due to the realignment, the reads may no longer support the variant. In order to see the new alignment of reads, you can use -bamout argument. You can then compare the aligned reads from the original bam file to the newly aligned reads in the -bamout file.

In the example below, you see the original bam file on the top, and on the bottom is the bam file after reassembly. In this case, there seem to be many SNPs present, however, after reassembly, we find there is really a large deletion!

In general most GATK tools don't care about ploidy. The major exception is, of course, at the variant calling step: the variant callers need to know what ploidy is assumed for a given sample in order to perform the appropriate calculations.

### Ploidy-related functionalities

As of version 3.3, the HaplotypeCaller and GenotypeGVCFs are able to deal with non-diploid organisms (whether haploid or exotically polyploid). In the case of HaplotypeCaller, you need to specify the ploidy of your non-diploid sample with the -ploidy argument. HC can only deal with one ploidy at a time, so if you want to process different chromosomes with different ploidies (e.g. to call X and Y in males) you need to run them separately. On the bright side, you can combine the resulting files afterward. In particular, if you’re running the -ERC GVCF workflow, you’ll find that both CombineGVCFs and GenotypeGVCFs are able to handle mixed ploidies (between locations and between samples). Both tools are able to correctly work out the ploidy of any given sample at a given site based on the composition of the GT field, so they don’t require you to specify the -ploidy argument.

For earlier versions (all the way to 2.0) the fallback option is UnifiedGenotyper, which also accepts the -ploidy argument.

### Cases where ploidy needs to be specified

1. Native variant calling in haploid or polyploid organisms.
2. Pooled calling where many pooled organisms share a single barcode and hence are treated as a single "sample".
3. Pooled validation/genotyping at known sites.

For normal organism ploidy, you just set the -ploidy argument to the desired number of chromosomes per organism. In the case of pooled sequencing experiments, this argument should be set to the number of chromosomes per barcoded sample, i.e. (Ploidy per individual) * (Individuals in pool).

## Important limitations

Several variant annotations are not appropriate for use with non-diploid cases. In particular, InbreedingCoeff will not be annotated on non-diploid calls. Annotations that do work and are supported in non-diploid use cases are the following: QUAL, QD, SB, FS, AC, AF, and Genotype annotations such as PL, AD, GT, etc.

You should also be aware of the fundamental accuracy limitations of high ploidy calling. Calling low-frequency variants in a pool or in an organism with high ploidy is hard because these rare variants become almost indistinguishable from sequencing errors.

### ReorderSam

The GATK can be particular about the ordering of a BAM file. If you find yourself in the not uncommon situation of having created or received BAM files sorted in a bad order, you can use the tool ReorderSam to generate a new BAM file where the reads have been reordered to match a well-ordered reference file.

java -jar picard/ReorderSam.jar I= lexicographc.bam O= kayrotypic.bam REFERENCE= Homo_sapiens_assembly18.kayrotypic.fasta


This tool requires you have a correctly sorted version of the reference sequence you used to align your reads. This tool will drop reads that don't have equivalent contigs in the new reference (potentially bad, but maybe not). If contigs have the same name in the bam and the new reference, this tool assumes that the alignment of the read in the new BAM is the same. This is not a lift over tool!

The tool, though once in the GATK, is now part of the Picard package.

Introduction

SelectVariants is a GATK tool used to subset a VCF file by many arbitrary criteria listed in the command line options below. The output VCF wiil have the AN (number of alleles), AC (allele count), AF (allele frequency), and DP (depth of coverage) annotations updated as necessary to accurately reflect the file's new contents.

Select Variants operates on VCF files (ROD Tracks) provided in the command line using the GATK's built in --variant option. You can provide multiple tracks for Select Variants but at least one must be named 'variant' and this will be the file all your analysis will be based of. Other tracks can be named as you please. Options requiring a reference to a ROD track name will use the track name provided in the -B option to refer to the correct VCF file (e.g. --discordance / --concordance ). All other analysis will be done in the 'variant' track.

Often, a VCF containing many samples and/or variants will need to be subset in order to facilitate certain analyses (e.g. comparing and contrasting cases vs. controls; extracting variant or non-variant loci that meet certain requirements, displaying just a few samples in a browser like IGV, etc.). SelectVariants can be used for this purpose. Given a single VCF file, one or more samples can be extracted from the file (based on a complete sample name or a pattern match). Variants can be further selected by specifying criteria for inclusion, i.e. "DP > 1000" (depth of coverage greater than 1000x), "AF < 0.25" (sites with allele frequency less than 0.25). These JEXL expressions are documented here in the FAQ article on JEXL expressions; it is particularly important to note the section on working with complex expressions.

### Command-line arguments

For a complete, detailed argument reference, refer to the GATK document page here.

### How do the AC, AF, AN, and DP fields change?

Let's say you have a file with three samples. The numbers before the ":" will be the genotype (0/0 is hom-ref, 0/1 is het, and 1/1 is hom-var), and the number after will be the depth of coverage.

BOB        MARY        LINDA
1/0:20     0/0:30      1/1:50


In this case, the INFO field will say AN=6, AC=3, AF=0.5, and DP=100 (in practice, I think these numbers won't necessarily add up perfectly because of some read filters we apply when calling, but it's approximately right).

Now imagine I only want a file with the samples "BOB" and "MARY". The new file would look like:

BOB        MARY
1/0:20     0/0:30


The INFO field will now have to change to reflect the state of the new data. It will be AN=4, AC=1, AF=0.25, DP=50.

Let's pretend that MARY's genotype wasn't 0/0, but was instead "./." (no genotype could be ascertained). This would look like

BOB        MARY
1/0:20     ./.:.


with AN=2, AC=1, AF=0.5, and DP=20.

### Subsetting by sample and ALT alleles

SelectVariants now keeps (r5832) the alt allele, even if a record is AC=0 after subsetting the site down to selected samples. For example, when selecting down to just sample NA12878 from the OMNI VCF in 1000G (1525 samples), the resulting VCF will look like:

1       82154   rs4477212       A       G       .       PASS    AC=0;AF=0.00;AN=2;CR=100.0;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7826;HW=1.0     GT:GC   0/0:0.7205
1       534247  SNP1-524110     C       T       .       PASS    AC=0;AF=0.00;AN=2;CR=99.93414;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7423;HW=1.0  GT:GC   0/0:0.6491
1       565286  SNP1-555149     C       T       .       PASS    AC=2;AF=1.00;AN=2;CR=98.8266;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7029;HW=1.0   GT:GC   1/1:0.3471
1       569624  SNP1-559487     T       C       .       PASS    AC=2;AF=1.00;AN=2;CR=97.8022;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.8070;HW=1.0   GT:GC   1/1:0.3942


Although NA12878 is 0/0 at the first sites, ALT allele is preserved in the VCF record. This is the correct behavior, as reducing samples down shouldn't change the character of the site, only the AC in the subpopulation. This is related to the tricky issue of isPolymorphic() vs. isVariant().

• isVariant => is there an ALT allele?

• isPolymorphic => is some sample non-ref in the samples?

In part this is complicated as the semantics of sites-only VCFs, where ALT = . is used to mean not-polymorphic. Unfortunately, I just don't think there's a consistent convention right now, but it might be worth at some point to adopt a single approach to handling this.

For clarity, in previous versions of SelectVariants, the first two monomorphic sites lose the ALT allele, because NA12878 is hom-ref at this site, resulting in VCF that looks like:

1       82154   rs4477212       A       .       .       PASS    AC=0;AF=0.00;AN=2;CR=100.0;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7826;HW=1.0     GT:GC   0/0:0.7205
1       534247  SNP1-524110     C       .       .       PASS    AC=0;AF=0.00;AN=2;CR=99.93414;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7423;HW=1.0  GT:GC   0/0:0.6491
1       565286  SNP1-555149     C       T       .       PASS    AC=2;AF=1.00;AN=2;CR=98.8266;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.7029;HW=1.0   GT:GC   1/1:0.3471
1       569624  SNP1-559487     T       C       .       PASS    AC=2;AF=1.00;AN=2;CR=97.8022;DP=0;GentrainScore=0.8070;HW=1.0   GT:GC   1/1:0.3942


If you really want a VCF without monomorphic sites, use the option to drop monomorphic sites after subsetting.

### Known issues

Some VCFs may have repeated header entries with the same key name, for instance:

##fileformat=VCFv3.3
##FILTER=ABFilter,&quot;AB &gt; 0.75&quot;
##FILTER=HRunFilter,&quot;HRun &gt; 3.0&quot;
##FILTER=QDFilter,&quot;QD &lt; 5.0&quot;
##UG_bam_file_used=file1.bam
##UG_bam_file_used=file2.bam
##UG_bam_file_used=file3.bam
##UG_bam_file_used=file4.bam
##UG_bam_file_used=file5.bam
##source=UnifiedGenotyper
##source=VariantFiltration
##source=AnnotateVCFwithMAF
...


Here, the "UG_bam_file_used" and "source" header lines appear multiple times. When SelectVariants is run on such a file, the program will emit warnings that these repeated header lines are being discarded, resulting in only the first instance of such a line being written to the resulting VCF. This behavior is not ideal, but expected under the current architecture.

For information on how to construct regular expressions for use with this tool, see the "Summary of regular-expression constructs" section here.

2 SNPs with significant strand bias

Several SNPs with excessive coverage

For a complete, detailed argument reference, refer to the GATK document page here.

### Introduction

In addition to true variation, variant callers emit a number of false-positives. Some of these false-positives can be detected and rejected by various statistical tests. VariantAnnotator provides a way of annotating variant calls as preparation for executing these tests.

Description of the haplotype score annotation

### Examples of Available Annotations

The list below is not comprehensive. Please use the --list argument to get a list of all possible annotations available. Also, see the FAQ article on understanding the Unified Genotyper's VCF files for a description of some of the more standard annotations.

Note that technically the VariantAnnotator does not require reads (from a BAM file) to run; if no reads are provided, only those Annotations which don't use reads (e.g. Chromosome Counts) will be added. But most Annotations do require reads. When running the tool we recommend that you add the -L argument with the variant rod to your command line for efficiency and speed.

### Introduction

Three-stage procedure:

• Create a master set of sites from your N batch VCFs that you want to genotype in all samples. At this stage you need to determine how you want to resolve disagreements among the VCFs. This is your master sites VCF.

• Take the master sites VCF and genotype each sample BAM file at these sites

• (Optionally) Merge the single sample VCFs into a master VCF file

### Creating the master set of sites: SNPs and Indels

The first step of batch merging is to create a master set of sites that you want to genotype in all samples. To make this problem concrete, suppose I have two VCF files:

Batch 1:

##fileformat=VCFv4.0
#CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO    FORMAT  NA12891
20      9999996     .       A       ATC     .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000000        .       T       G       .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000117        .       C       T       .       FAIL    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000211        .       C       T       .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10001436        .       A       AGG     .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   1/1:30


Batch 2:

##fileformat=VCFv4.0
#CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO    FORMAT  NA12878
20      9999996     .       A       ATC     .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000117        .       C       T       .       FAIL    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000211        .       C       T       .       FAIL    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30
20      10000598        .       T       A       .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   1/1:30
20      10001436        .       A       AGGCT   .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   1/1:30


In order to merge these batches, I need to make a variety of bookkeeping and filtering decisions, as outlined in the merged VCF below:

Master VCF:

20      9999996     .       A       ATC     .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30  [pass in both]
20      10000000        .       T       G       .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30  [only in batch 1]
20      10000117        .       C       T       .       FAIL    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30  [fail in both]
20      10000211        .       C       T       .       FAIL    .       GT:GQ   0/1:30  [pass in 1, fail in 2, choice in unclear]
20      10000598        .       T       A       .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   1/1:30  [only in batch 2]
20      10001436        .       A       AGGCT   .       PASS    .       GT:GQ   1/1:30  [A/AGG in batch 1, A/AGGCT in batch 2, including this site may be problematic]


These issues fall into the following categories:

• For sites present in all VCFs (20:9999996 above), the alleles agree, and each site PASS is pass, this site can obviously be considered "PASS" in the master VCF
• Some sites may be PASS in one batch, but absent in others (20:10000000 and 20:10000598), which occurs when the site is polymorphic in one batch but all samples are reference or no-called in the other batch
• Similarly, sites that are fail in all batches in which they occur can be safely filtered out, or included as failing filters in the master VCF (20:10000117)

There are two difficult situations that must be addressed by the needs of the project merging batches:

• Some sites may be PASS in some batches but FAIL in others. This might indicate that either:
• The site is actually truly polymorphic, but due to limited coverage, poor sequencing, or other issues it is flag as unreliable in some batches. In these cases, it makes sense to include the site
• The site is actually a common machine artifact, but just happened to escape standard filtering in a few batches. In these cases, you would obviously like to filter out the site
• Even more complicated, it is possible that in the PASS batches you have found a reliable allele (C/T, for example) while in others there's no alt allele but actually a low-frequency error, which is flagged as failing. Ideally, here you could filter out the failing allele from the FAIL batches, and keep the pass ones
• Some sites may have multiple segregating alleles in each batch. Such sites are often errors, but in some cases may be actual multi-allelic sites, in particular for indels.

Unfortunately, we cannot determine which is actually the correct choice, especially given the goals of the project. We leave it up the project bioinformatician to handle these cases when creating the master VCF. We are hopeful that at some point in the future we'll have a consensus approach to handle such merging, but until then this will be a manual process.

The GATK tool CombineVariants can be used to merge multiple VCF files, and parameter choices will allow you to handle some of the above issues. With tools like SelectVariants one can slice-and-dice the merged VCFs to handle these complexities as appropriate for your project's needs. For example, the above master merge can be produced with the following CombineVariants:

java -jar dist/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \
-T CombineVariants \
-R human_g1k_v37.fasta \
-V:one,VCF combine.1.vcf -V:two,VCF combine.2.vcf \
--sites_only \
-minimalVCF \
-o master.vcf


producing the following VCF:

##fileformat=VCFv4.0
#CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO
20      9999996     .       A       ACT         .       PASS    set=Intersection
20      10000000        .       T       G           .   PASS    set=one
20      10000117        .       C       T           .       FAIL    set=FilteredInAll
20      10000211        .       C       T           .       PASS    set=filterIntwo-one
20      10000598        .       T       A           .       PASS    set=two
20      10001436        .       A       AGG,AGGCT       .       PASS    set=Intersection


### Genotyping your samples at these sites

Having created the master set of sites to genotype, along with their alleles, as in the previous section, you now use the UnifiedGenotyper to genotype each sample independently at the master set of sites. This GENOTYPE_GIVEN_ALLELES mode of the UnifiedGenotyper will jump into the sample BAM file, and calculate the genotype and genotype likelihoods of the sample at the site for each of the genotypes available for the REF and ALT alleles. For example, for site 10000211, the UnifiedGenotyper would evaluate the likelihoods of the CC, CT, and TT genotypes for the sample at this site, choose the most likely configuration, and generate a VCF record containing the genotype call and the likelihoods for the three genotype configurations.

As a concrete example command line, you can genotype the master.vcf file using in the bundle sample NA12878 with the following command:

java -Xmx2g -jar dist/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \
-T UnifiedGenotyper \
-R bundle/b37/human_g1k_v37.fasta \
-I bundle/b37/NA12878.HiSeq.WGS.bwa.cleaned.recal.hg19.20.bam \
-alleles master.vcf \
-L master.vcf \
-gt_mode GENOTYPE_GIVEN_ALLELES \
-out_mode EMIT_ALL_SITES \
-stand_call_conf 0.0 \
-glm BOTH \
-G none \


The -L master.vcf argument tells the UG to only genotype the sites in the master file. If you don't specify this, the UG will genotype the master sites in GGA mode, but it will also genotype all other sites in the genome in regular mode.

The last item,-G  prevents the UG from computing annotations you don't need. This command produces something like the following output:

##fileformat=VCFv4.0
#CHROM  POS     ID      REF     ALT     QUAL    FILTER  INFO    FORMAT  NA12878
20      9999996     .       A       ACT         4576.19 .       .   GT:DP:GQ:PL     1/1:76:99:4576,229,0
20      10000000        .       T       G           0       .       .       GT:DP:GQ:PL     0/0:79:99:0,238,3093
20      10000211        .       C       T       857.79  .       .   GT:AD:DP:GQ:PL  0/1:28,27:55:99:888,0,870
20      10000598        .       T       A           1800.57 .       .   GT:AD:DP:GQ:PL  1/1:0,48:48:99:1834,144,0
20      10001436        .       A       AGG,AGGCT       1921.12 .       .   GT:DP:GQ:PL     0/2:49:84.06:1960,2065,0,2695,222,84


Several things should be noted here:

• The genotype likelihoods calculation evolves, especially for indels, the exact results of this command will change.
• The command will emit sites that are hom-ref in the sample at the site, but the -stand_call_conf 0.0 argument should be provided so that they aren't tagged as "LowQual" by the UnifiedGenotyper.
• The filtered site 10000117 in the master.vcf is not genotyped by the UG, as it doesn't pass filters and so is considered bad by the GATK UG. If you want to determine the genotypes for all sites, independent on filtering, you must unfilter all of your records in master.vcf, and if desired, restore the filter string for these records later.

This genotyping command can be performed independently per sample, and so can be parallelized easily on a farm with one job per sample, as in the following:

foreach sample in samples:
run UnifiedGenotyper command above with -I $sample.bam -o$sample.vcf
end


### (Optional) Merging the sample VCFs together

You can use a similar command for CombineVariants above to merge back together all of your single sample genotyping runs. Suppose all of my UnifiedGenotyper jobs have completed, and I have VCF files named sample1.vcf, sample2.vcf, to sampleN.vcf. The single command:

java -jar dist/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar -T CombineVariants -R human_g1k_v37.fasta -V:sample1 sample1.vcf -V:sample2 sample2.vcf [repeat until] -V:sampleN sampleN.vcf -o combined.vcf


### General notes

• Because the GATK uses dynamic downsampling of reads, it is possible for truly marginal calls to change likelihoods from discovery (processing the BAM incrementally) vs. genotyping (jumping into the BAM). Consequently, do not be surprised to see minor differences in the genotypes for samples from discovery and genotyping.
• More advanced users may want to consider group several samples together for genotyping. For example, 100 samples could be genotyped in 10 groups of 10 samples, resulting in only 10 VCF files. Merging the 10 VCF files may be faster (or just easier to manage) than 1000 individual VCFs.
• Sometimes, using this method, a monomorphic site within a batch will be identified as polymorphic in one or more samples within that same batch. This is because the UnifiedGenotyper applies a frequency prior to determine whether a site is likely to be monomorphic. If the site is monomorphic, it is either not output, or if EMIT_ALL_SITES is thrown, reference genotypes are output. If the site is determined to be polymorphic, genotypes are assigned greedily (as of GATK-v1.4). Calling single-sample reduces the effect of the prior, so sites which were considered monomorphic within a batch could be considered polymorphic within a sub-batch.

Detailed information about command line options for BaseRecalibrator can be found here.

## Introduction

The tools in this package recalibrate base quality scores of sequencing-by-synthesis reads in an aligned BAM file. After recalibration, the quality scores in the QUAL field in each read in the output BAM are more accurate in that the reported quality score is closer to its actual probability of mismatching the reference genome. Moreover, the recalibration tool attempts to correct for variation in quality with machine cycle and sequence context, and by doing so provides not only more accurate quality scores but also more widely dispersed ones. The system works on BAM files coming from many sequencing platforms: Illumina, SOLiD, 454, Complete Genomics, Pacific Biosciences, etc.

New with the release of the full version of GATK 2.0 is the ability to recalibrate not only the well-known base quality scores but also base insertion and base deletion quality scores. These are per-base quantities which estimate the probability that the next base in the read was mis-incorporated or mis-deleted (due to slippage, for example). We've found that these new quality scores are very valuable in indel calling algorithms. In particular these new probabilities fit very naturally as the gap penalties in an HMM-based indel calling algorithms. We suspect there are many other fantastic uses for these data.

This process is accomplished by analyzing the covariation among several features of a base. For example:

• Reported quality score
• The position within the read
• The preceding and current nucleotide (sequencing chemistry effect) observed by the sequencing machine

These covariates are then subsequently applied through a piecewise tabular correction to recalibrate the quality scores of all reads in a BAM file.

For example, pre-calibration a file could contain only reported Q25 bases, which seems good. However, it may be that these bases actually mismatch the reference at a 1 in 100 rate, so are actually Q20. These higher-than-empirical quality scores provide false confidence in the base calls. Moreover, as is common with sequencing-by-synthesis machine, base mismatches with the reference occur at the end of the reads more frequently than at the beginning. Also, mismatches are strongly associated with sequencing context, in that the dinucleotide AC is often much lower quality than TG. The recalibration tool will not only correct the average Q inaccuracy (shifting from Q25 to Q20) but identify subsets of high-quality bases by separating the low-quality end of read bases AC bases from the high-quality TG bases at the start of the read. See below for examples of pre and post corrected values.

The system was designed for users to be able to easily add new covariates to the calculations. For users wishing to add their own covariate simply look at QualityScoreCovariate.java for an idea of how to implement the required interface. Each covariate is a Java class which implements the org.broadinstitute.sting.gatk.walkers.recalibration.Covariate interface. Specifically, the class needs to have a getValue method defined which looks at the read and associated sequence context and pulls out the desired information such as machine cycle.

## Running the tools

### BaseRecalibrator

Detailed information about command line options for BaseRecalibrator can be found here.

This GATK processing step walks over all of the reads in my_reads.bam and tabulates data about the following features of the bases:

• assigned quality score
• machine cycle producing this base
• current base + previous base (dinucleotide)

For each bin, we count the number of bases within the bin and how often such bases mismatch the reference base, excluding loci known to vary in the population, according to dbSNP. After running over all reads, BaseRecalibrator produces a file called my_reads.recal_data.grp, which contains the data needed to recalibrate reads. The format of this GATK report is described below.

### Creating a recalibrated BAM

To create a recalibrated BAM you can use GATK's PrintReads with the engine on-the-fly recalibration capability. Here is a typical command line to do so:


java -jar GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \
-R reference.fasta \
-I input.bam \
-BQSR recalibration_report.grp \
-o output.bam


After computing covariates in the initial BAM File, we then walk through the BAM file again and rewrite the quality scores (in the QUAL field) using the data in the recalibration_report.grp file, into a new BAM file.

This step uses the recalibration table data in recalibration_report.grp produced by BaseRecalibration to recalibrate the quality scores in input.bam, and writing out a new BAM file output.bam with recalibrated QUAL field values.

Effectively the new quality score is:

• the sum of the global difference between reported quality scores and the empirical quality
• plus the quality bin specific shift
• plus the cycle x qual and dinucleotide x qual effect

Following recalibration, the read quality scores are much closer to their empirical scores than before. This means they can be used in a statistically robust manner for downstream processing, such as SNP calling. In additional, by accounting for quality changes by cycle and sequence context, we can identify truly high quality bases in the reads, often finding a subset of bases that are Q30 even when no bases were originally labeled as such.

### Miscellaneous information

• The recalibration system is read-group aware. It separates the covariate data by read group in the recalibration_report.grp file (using @RG tags) and PrintReads will apply this data for each read group in the file. We routinely process BAM files with multiple read groups. Please note that the memory requirements scale linearly with the number of read groups in the file, so that files with many read groups could require a significant amount of RAM to store all of the covariate data.
• A critical determinant of the quality of the recalibation is the number of observed bases and mismatches in each bin. The system will not work well on a small number of aligned reads. We usually expect well in excess of 100M bases from a next-generation DNA sequencer per read group. 1B bases yields significantly better results.
• Unless your database of variation is so poor and/or variation so common in your organism that most of your mismatches are real snps, you should always perform recalibration on your bam file. For humans, with dbSNP and now 1000 Genomes available, almost all of the mismatches - even in cancer - will be errors, and an accurate error model (essential for downstream analysis) can be ascertained.
• The recalibrator applies a "yates" correction for low occupancy bins. Rather than inferring the true Q score from # mismatches / # bases we actually infer it from (# mismatches + 1) / (# bases + 2). This deals very nicely with overfitting problems, which has only a minor impact on data sets with billions of bases but is critical to avoid overconfidence in rare bins in sparse data.

## Example pre and post recalibration results

• Recalibration of a lane sequenced at the Broad by an Illumina GA-II in February 2010
• There is a significant improvement in the accuracy of the base quality scores after applying the GATK recalibration procedure

## The output of the BaseRecalibrator

• A Recalibration report containing all the recalibration information for the data

Note that the BasRecalibrator no longer produces plots; this is now done by the AnalyzeCovariates tool.

### The Recalibration Report

The recalibration report is a [GATKReport](http://gatk.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1244/what-is-a-gatkreport) and not only contains the main result of the analysis, but it is also used as an input to all subsequent analyses on the data. The recalibration report contains the following 5 tables:

• Arguments Table -- a table with all the arguments and its values
• Quantization Table
• Quality Score Table
• Covariates Table

#### Arguments Table

This is the table that contains all the arguments used to run BQSRv2 for this dataset. This is important for the on-the-fly recalibration step to use the same parameters used in the recalibration step (context sizes, covariates, ...).

Example Arguments table:


#:GATKTable:true:1:17::;
#:GATKTable:Arguments:Recalibration argument collection values used in this run
Argument                    Value
covariate                   null
default_platform            null
deletions_context_size      6
force_platform              null
insertions_context_size     6
...


#### Quantization Table

The GATK offers native support to quantize base qualities. The GATK quantization procedure uses a statistical approach to determine the best binning system that minimizes the error introduced by amalgamating the different qualities present in the specific dataset. When running BQSRv2, a table with the base counts for each base quality is generated and a 'default' quantization table is generated. This table is a required parameter for any other tool in the GATK if you want to quantize your quality scores.

The default behavior (currently) is to use no quantization when performing on-the-fly recalibration. You can override this by using the engine argument -qq. With -qq 0 you don't quantize qualities, or -qq N you recalculate the quantization bins using N bins on the fly. Note that quantization is completely experimental now and we do not recommend using it unless you are a super advanced user.

Example Arguments table:


#:GATKTable:true:2:94:::;
#:GATKTable:Quantized:Quality quantization map
QualityScore  Count        QuantizedScore
0                     252               0
1                   15972               1
2                  553525               2
3                 2190142               9
4                 5369681               9
9                83645762               9
...


This table contains the empirical quality scores for each read group, for mismatches insertions and deletions. This is not different from the table used in the old table recalibration walker.


#:GATKTable:false:6:18:%s:%s:%.4f:%.4f:%d:%d:;
#:GATKTable:RecalTable0:
ReadGroup  EventType  EmpiricalQuality  EstimatedQReported  Observations  Errors
SRR032768  D                   40.7476             45.0000    2642683174    222475
SRR032766  D                   40.9072             45.0000    2630282426    213441
SRR032764  D                   40.5931             45.0000    2919572148    254687
SRR032769  D                   40.7448             45.0000    2850110574    240094
SRR032767  D                   40.6820             45.0000    2820040026    241020
SRR032765  D                   40.9034             45.0000    2441035052    198258
SRR032766  M                   23.2573             23.7733    2630282426  12424434
SRR032768  M                   23.0281             23.5366    2642683174  13159514
SRR032769  M                   23.2608             23.6920    2850110574  13451898
SRR032764  M                   23.2302             23.6039    2919572148  13877177
SRR032765  M                   23.0271             23.5527    2441035052  12158144
SRR032767  M                   23.1195             23.5852    2820040026  13750197
SRR032766  I                   41.7198             45.0000    2630282426    177017
SRR032768  I                   41.5682             45.0000    2642683174    184172
SRR032769  I                   41.5828             45.0000    2850110574    197959
SRR032764  I                   41.2958             45.0000    2919572148    216637
SRR032765  I                   41.5546             45.0000    2441035052    170651
SRR032767  I                   41.5192             45.0000    2820040026    198762


#### Quality Score Table

This table contains the empirical quality scores for each read group and original quality score, for mismatches insertions and deletions. This is not different from the table used in the old table recalibration walker.


#:GATKTable:false:6:274:%s:%s:%s:%.4f:%d:%d:;
#:GATKTable:RecalTable1:
ReadGroup  QualityScore  EventType  EmpiricalQuality  Observations  Errors
SRR032767            49  M                   33.7794          9549        3
SRR032769            49  M                   36.9975          5008        0
SRR032764            49  M                   39.2490          8411        0
SRR032766            18  M                   17.7397      16330200   274803
SRR032768            18  M                   17.7922      17707920   294405
SRR032764            45  I                   41.2958    2919572148   216637
SRR032765             6  M                    6.0600       3401801   842765
SRR032769            45  I                   41.5828    2850110574   197959
SRR032764             6  M                    6.0751       4220451  1041946
SRR032767            45  I                   41.5192    2820040026   198762
SRR032769             6  M                    6.3481       5045533  1169748
SRR032768            16  M                   15.7681      12427549   329283
SRR032766            16  M                   15.8173      11799056   309110
SRR032764            16  M                   15.9033      13017244   334343
SRR032769            16  M                   15.8042      13817386   363078
...


#### Covariates Table

This table has the empirical qualities for each covariate used in the dataset. The default covariates are cycle and context. In the current implementation, context is of a fixed size (default 6). Each context and each cycle will have an entry on this table stratified by read group and original quality score.


#:GATKTable:false:8:1003738:%s:%s:%s:%s:%s:%.4f:%d:%d:;
#:GATKTable:RecalTable2:
ReadGroup  QualityScore  CovariateValue  CovariateName  EventType  EmpiricalQuality  Observations  Errors
SRR032767            16  TACGGA          Context        M                   14.2139           817      30
SRR032766            16  AACGGA          Context        M                   14.9938          1420      44
SRR032765            16  TACGGA          Context        M                   15.5145           711      19
SRR032768            16  AACGGA          Context        M                   15.0133          1585      49
SRR032764            16  TACGGA          Context        M                   14.5393           710      24
SRR032766            16  GACGGA          Context        M                   17.9746          1379      21
SRR032768            45  CACCTC          Context        I                   40.7907        575849      47
SRR032764            45  TACCTC          Context        I                   43.8286        507088      20
SRR032769            45  TACGGC          Context        D                   38.7536         37525       4
SRR032768            45  GACCTC          Context        I                   46.0724        445275      10
SRR032766            45  CACCTC          Context        I                   41.0696        575664      44
SRR032769            45  TACCTC          Context        I                   43.4821        490491      21
SRR032766            45  CACGGC          Context        D                   45.1471         65424       1
SRR032768            45  GACGGC          Context        D                   45.3980         34657       0
SRR032767            45  TACGGC          Context        D                   42.7663         37814       1
SRR032767            16  AACGGA          Context        M                   15.9371          1647      41
SRR032764            16  GACGGA          Context        M                   18.2642          1273      18
SRR032769            16  CACGGA          Context        M                   13.0801          1442      70
SRR032765            16  GACGGA          Context        M                   15.9934          1271      31
...


## Troubleshooting

The memory requirements of the recalibrator will vary based on the type of JVM running the application and the number of read groups in the input bam file.

If the application reports 'java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space', increase the max heap size provided to the JVM by adding ' -Xmx????m' to the jvm_args variable in RecalQual.py, where '????' is the maximum available memory on the processing computer.

I've tried recalibrating my data using a downloaded file, such as NA12878 on 454, and apply the table to any of the chromosome BAM files always fails due to hitting my memory limit. I've tried giving it as much as 15GB but that still isn't enough.

All of our big merged files for 454 are running with -Xmx16000m arguments to the JVM -- it's enough to process all of the files. 32GB might make the 454 runs a lot faster though.

I have a recalibration file calculated over the entire genome (such as for the 1000 genomes trio) but I split my file into pieces (such as by chromosome). Can the recalibration tables safely be applied to the per chromosome BAM files?

Yes they can. The original tables needed to be calculated over the whole genome but they can be applied to each piece of the data set independently.

I'm working on a genome that doesn't really have a good SNP database yet. I'm wondering if it still makes sense to run base quality score recalibration without known SNPs.

The base quality score recalibrator treats every reference mismatch as indicative of machine error. True polymorphisms are legitimate mismatches to the reference and shouldn't be counted against the quality of a base. We use a database of known polymorphisms to skip over most polymorphic sites. Unfortunately without this information the data becomes almost completely unusable since the quality of the bases will be inferred to be much much lower than it actually is as a result of the reference-mismatching SNP sites.

However, all is not lost if you are willing to experiment a bit. You can bootstrap a database of known SNPs. Here's how it works:

• First do an initial round of SNP calling on your original, unrecalibrated data.
• Then take the SNPs that you have the highest confidence in and use that set as the database of known SNPs by feeding it as a VCF file to the base quality score recalibrator.
• Finally, do a real round of SNP calling with the recalibrated data. These steps could be repeated several times until convergence.

### Downsampling to reduce run time

For users concerned about run time please note this small analysis below showing the approximate number of reads per read group that are required to achieve a given level of recalibration performance. The analysis was performed with 51 base pair Illumina reads on pilot data from the 1000 Genomes Project. Downsampling can be achieved by specifying a genome interval using the -L option. For users concerned only with recalibration accuracy please disregard this plot and continue to use all available data when generating the recalibration table.

### Introduction

Processing data originated in the Pacific Biosciences RS platform has been evaluated by the GSA and publicly presented in numerous occasions. The guidelines we describe in this document were the result of a systematic technology development experiment on some datasets (human, E. coli and Rhodobacter) from the Broad Institute. These guidelines produced better results than the ones obtained using alternative pipelines up to this date (september 2011) for the datasets tested, but there is no guarantee that it will be the best for every dataset and that other pipelines won't supersede it in the future.

The pipeline we propose here is illustrated in a Q script (PacbioProcessingPipeline.scala) distributed with the GATK as an example for educational purposes. This pipeline has not been extensively tested and is not supported by the GATK team. You are free to use it and modify it for your needs following the guidelines below.

### BWA alignment

First we take the filtered_subreads.fq file output by the Pacific Biosciences RS SMRT pipeline and align it using BWA. We use BWA with the bwasw algorithm and allow for relaxing the gap open penalty to account for the excess of insertions and deletions known to be typical error modes of the data. For an idea on what parameters to use check suggestions given by the BWA author in the BWA manual page that are specific to Pacbio. The goal is to account for Pacific Biosciences RS known error mode and benefit from the long reads for a high scoring overall match. (for older versions, you can use the filtered_subreads.fasta and combine the base quality scores extracted from the h5 files using Pacific Biosciences SMRT pipeline python tools)

To produce a BAM file that is sorted by coordinate with adequate read group information we use Picard tools: SortSam and AddOrReplaceReadGroups. These steps are necessary because all subsequent tools require that the BAM file follow these rules. It is also generally considered good practices to have your BAM file conform to these specifications.

### Best Practices for Variant Calling

Once we have a proper BAM file, it is important to estimate the empirical quality scores using statistics based on a known callset (e.g. latest dbSNP) and the following covariates: QualityScore, Dinucleotide and ReadGroup. You can follow the GATK's Best Practices for Variant Detection according the type of data you have, with the exception of indel realignment, because the tool has not been adapted for Pacific Biosciences RS data.

### Problems with Variant Calling with Pacific Biosciences

• Calling must be more permissive of indels in the data.

You will have to adjust your calling thresholds in the Unified Genotyper to allow sites with a higher indel rate to be analyzed.

• Base quality thresholds should be adjusted to the specifics of your data.

Be aware that the Unified Genotyper has cutoffs for base quality score and if your data is on average Q20 (a common occurrence with Pacific Biosciences RS data) you may need to adjust your quality thresholds to allow the GATK to analyze your data. There is no right answer here, you have to choose parameters consistent with your average base quality scores, evaluate the calls made with the selected threshold and modify as necessary.

• Reference bias

To account for the high insertion and deletion error rate of the Pacific Biosciences data instrument, we often have to set the gap open penalty to be lower than the base mismatch penalty in order to maximize alignment performance. Despite aligning most of the reads successfully, this creates the side effect that the aligner will sometimes prefer to "hide" a true SNP inside an insertion. The result is accurate mapping, albeit with a reference-biased alignment. It is important to note however, that reference bias is an artifact of the alignment process, not the data, and can be greatly reduced by locally realigning the reads based on the reference and the data. Presently, the available software for local realignment is not compatible with the length and the high indel rate of Pacific Bioscience data, but we expect new tools to handle this problem in the future. Ultimately reference bias will mask real calls and you will have to inspect these by hand.

#### See this announcement regarding our plans for support of DepthOfCoverage and DiagnoseTargets. If you find that there are functionalities missing in either tool, leave us a comment and we will consider adding them.

For a complete, detailed argument reference, refer to the GATK document page here.

### Introduction

DepthOfCoverage is a coverage profiler for a (possibly multi-sample) bam file. It uses a granular histogram that can be user-specified to present useful aggregate coverage data. It reports the following metrics over the entire .bam file:

• Total, mean, median, and quartiles for each partition type: aggregate
• Total, mean, median, and quartiles for each partition type: for each interval
• A series of histograms of the number of bases covered to Y depth for each partition type (granular; e.g. Y can be a range, like 16 to 22)
• A matrix of counts of the number of intervals for which at least Y samples and/or read groups had a median coverage of at least X
• A matrix of counts of the number of bases that were covered to at least X depth, in at least Y groups (e.g. # of loci with ≥15x coverage for ≥12 samples)
• A matrix of proportions of the number of bases that were covered to at least X depth, in at least Y groups (e.g. proportion of loci with ≥18x coverage for ≥15 libraries)

Because the common question "What proportion of my targeted bases are well-powered to discover SNPs?" is answered by the last matrix on the above list, it is strongly recommended that this walker be run on all samples simultaneously.

For humans, DepthOfCoverage can also be configured to output these statistics aggregated over genes, by providing it with a RefSeq ROD.

DepthOfCoverage also outputs, by default, the total coverage at every locus, and the coverage per sample and/or read group. This behavior can optionally be turned off, or switched to base count mode, where base counts will be output at each locus, rather than total depth.

### Coverage by Gene

To get a summary of coverage by each gene, you may supply a refseq (or alternative) gene list via the argument

-geneList /path/to/gene/list.txt


The provided gene list must be of the following format:

585     NM_001005484    chr1    +       58953   59871   58953   59871   1       58953,  59871,  0       OR4F5   cmpl    cmpl    0,
587     NM_001005224    chr1    +       357521  358460  357521  358460  1       357521, 358460, 0       OR4F3   cmpl    cmpl    0,
587     NM_001005277    chr1    +       357521  358460  357521  358460  1       357521, 358460, 0       OR4F16  cmpl    cmpl    0,
587     NM_001005221    chr1    +       357521  358460  357521  358460  1       357521, 358460, 0       OR4F29  cmpl    cmpl    0,
589     NM_001005224    chr1    -       610958  611897  610958  611897  1       610958, 611897, 0       OR4F3   cmpl    cmpl    0,
589     NM_001005277    chr1    -       610958  611897  610958  611897  1       610958, 611897, 0       OR4F16  cmpl    cmpl    0,
589     NM_001005221    chr1    -       610958  611897  610958  611897  1       610958, 611897, 0       OR4F29  cmpl    cmpl    0,


If you are on the broad network, the properly-formatted file containing refseq genes and transcripts is located at

/humgen/gsa-hpprojects/GATK/data/refGene.sorted.txt


If you supply the -geneList argument, DepthOfCoverage will output an additional summary file that looks as follows:

Gene_Name     Total_Cvg       Avg_Cvg       Sample_1_Total_Cvg    Sample_1_Avg_Cvg    Sample_1_Cvg_Q3       Sample_1_Cvg_Median      Sample_1_Cvg_Q1
SORT1    594710  238.27  594710  238.27  165     245     330
NOTCH2  3011542 357.84  3011542 357.84  222     399     &gt;500
LMNA    563183  186.73  563183  186.73  116     187     262
NOS1AP  513031  203.50  513031  203.50  91      191     290


Note that the gene coverage will be aggregated only over samples (not read groups, libraries, or other types). The -geneList argument also requires specific intervals within genes to be given (say, the particular exons you are interested in, or the entire gene), and it functions by aggregating coverage from the interval level to the gene level, by referencing each interval to the gene in which it falls. Because by-gene aggregation looks for intervals that overlap genes, -geneList is ignored if -omitIntervals` is thrown.

There are two types of GATK tools that are able to use pedigree (family structure) information:

### Tools that require a pedigree to operate

PhaseByTransmission and CalculateGenotypePosterior will not run without a properly formatted pedigree file. These tools are part of the Genotype Refinement workflow, which is documented here.

### Tools that are able to generate standard variant annotations

The two variant callers (HaplotypeCaller and the deprecated UnifiedGenotyper) as well as VariantAnnotator and GenotypeGVCFs are all able to use pedigree information if you request an annotation that involves population structure (e.g. Inbreeding Coefficient). To be clear though, the pedigree information is not used during the variant calling process; it is only used during the annotation step at the end.

If you already have VCF files that were called without pedigree information, and you want to add pedigree-related annotations (e.g to use Variant Quality Score Recalibration (VQSR) with the InbreedingCoefficient as a feature annotation), don't panic. Just run the latest version of the VariantAnnotator to re-annotate your variants, requesting any missing annotations, and make sure you pass your PED file to the VariantAnnotator as well. If you forget to provide the pedigree file, the tool will run successfully but pedigree-related annotations may not be generated (this behavior is different in some older versions).