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Motivation Population-scale sequenced cohorts are foundational resources for genetic analyses, but processing raw reads into analysis-ready cohort-level variants remains challenging. Results We introduce an open-source cohort-calling method that uses the highly accurate caller DeepVariant and scalable merging tool GLnexus. Using callset quality metrics based on variant recall and precision in benchmark samples and Mendelian consistency in father-mother-child trios, we optimize the method across a range of cohort sizes, sequencing methods and sequencing depths. The resulting callsets show consistent quality improvements over those generated using existing best practices with reduced cost. We further evaluate our pipeline in the deeply sequenced 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP) samples and show superior callset quality metrics and imputation reference panel performance compared to an independently generated GATK Best Practices pipeline. Availability and implementation We publicly release the 1KGP individual-level variant calls and cohort callset (https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/brain-genomics-public/research/cohort/1KGP) to foster additional development and evaluation of cohort merging methods as well as broad studies of genetic variation. Both DeepVariant (https://github.com/google/deepvariant) and GLnexus (https://github.com/dnanexus-rnd/GLnexus) are open-source, and the optimized GLnexus setup discovered in this study is also integrated into GLnexus public releases v1.2.2 and later. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Population-scale sequenced cohorts are foundational resources for many genetic analyses, but creating them from single-sample variant calls remains challenging. Here we introduce an open-source cohort-calling method that uses the highly accurate germline caller DeepVariant and scalable merging tool GLnexus. Using callset quality metrics based on variant recall and precision in benchmark samples and Mendelian consistency in father-mother-child trios, we optimized the method across a range of cohort sizes, sequencing methods, and sequencing depths. The resulting callsets show consistent quality improvements over those generated using existing best practices. We further evaluated the DeepVariant+GLnexus pipeline in the deeply sequenced 1000 Genomes Project phase 3 samples (1KGP) and show superior callset quality metrics and imputation reference panel performance compared to an independently-generated GATK Best Practices pipeline. We publicly release the 1KGP individual-level variant calls and cohort callset to foster additional development and evaluation of cohort merging methods as well as broad studies of genetic variation.

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There is currently a dearth of accessible whole genome sequencing (WGS) data for individuals residing in the Americas with Sub-Saharan African ancestry. We generated whole genome sequencing data at intermediate (15×) coverage for 2,294 individuals with large amounts of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, predominantly Atlantic African admixed with varying amounts of European and American ancestry. We performed extensive comparisons of variant callers, phasing algorithms, and variant filtration on these data to construct a high quality imputation panel containing data from 2,269 unrelated individuals. With the exception of the TOPMed imputation server (which notably cannot be downloaded), our panel substantially outperformed other available panels when imputing African American individuals. The raw sequencing data, variant calls and imputation panel for this cohort are all freely available via dbGaP and should prove an invaluable resource for further study of admixed African genetics.