Framework for evaluating variant detection methods: comparison of aligners and callers

I’ll show a 12 way comparison between 2 different aligners (novoalign and bwa mem), 2 different post-alignment preparation methods (GATK best practices and the Marth lab’s gkno pipeline), and 3 different variant callers (GATK UnifiedGenotyper, GATK HaplotypeCaller, and FreeBayes). This allows comparison of openly available methods (bwa mem, gkno preparation, and FreeBayes) with those that require licensing (novoalign, GATK’s variant callers). I’ll also describe bcbio-nextgen, the fully automated open-source pipeline used for variant calling and evaluation, which allows others to easily bring this methodology into their own work and extend this analysis.