dv-trio: a family-based variant calling pipeline using DeepVariant.

Abstract

In 2018, Google published an innovative variant caller, DeepVariant, which converts pileups of sequence reads into images and uses a deep neural network to identify single-nucleotide variants and small insertion/deletions from next-generation sequencing data. This approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art tools. However, DeepVariant was designed to call variants within a single sample. In disease sequencing studies, the ability to examine a family trio (father-mother-affected child) provides greater power for disease mutation discovery. To further improve DeepVariant's variant calling accuracy in family-based sequencing studies, we have developed a family-based variant calling pipeline, dv-trio, which incorporates the trio information from the Mendelian genetic model into variant calling based on DeepVariant. dv-trio is available via an open source BSD3 license at GitHub (https://github.com/VCCRI/dv-trio/). e.giannoulatou@victorchang.edu.au. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.