Somatic small-variant calling methods in Illumina DRAGEN™ Secondary Analysis

Abstract

We present the DRAGEN™ somatic pipeline for calling small somatic variants from tumor samples, with or without paired normal samples. The DRAGEN somatic variant caller offers 1) a flexible architecture that can be used on a wide array of somatic use cases; 2) built-in noise models enabling robustness against various sources of noise artifacts (mapping, genome context, or sample specific); 3) performance of joint analysis of tumor and normal samples in the case of a tumor-normal workflow yielding improved accuracy; 4) benefits from FPGA acceleration for efficient run time. We demonstrate the speed and accuracy of the DRAGEN tumor-normal pipeline across a range of whole genome sequencing (WGS) datasets and compare against third party tools such as Mutect2/GATK4 [1] and Strelka2 [2]. DRAGEN secondary analysis outperforms all other tools with its ability to complete a 110x/40x T/N whole-genome analysis in less than two hours. It offers exceptional accuracy, with higher sensitivity and precision than third party tools. We also show that the DRAGEN T/N workflow supports analysis of liquid and late-stage solid tumors by tolerating tumor-in-normal (TiN) contamination.

A Bioinformatics Toolkit for Next-Generation Sequencing in Clinical Oncology

“…For example, the DRAGEN secondary analysis pipeline ensures all the steps from sequencing files to annotated and filtered genetic alterations. It was recently benchmarked, and the authors claim its value in a preprint that came out this year [19]. * Used in our in-house bioinformatics pipeline.…”