RIG: Recalibration and Interrelation of Genomic Sequence Data with the GATK

Recent advances in variant calling made available in the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) enable the use of validated single-nucleotide polymorphisms and indels to improve variant calling. However, large collections of variants for this purpose often are unavailable to research communities. We introduce a workflow to generate reliable collections of single-nucleotide polymorphisms and indels by leveraging available genomic resources to inform variant calling using the GATK. The workflow is demonstrated for the crop plant Sorghum bicolor by (i) generating an initial set of variants using reduced representation sequence data from an experimental cross and association panels, (ii) using the initial variants to inform variant calling from whole-genome sequence data of resequenced individuals, and (iii) using variants identified from whole-genome sequence data for recalibration of the reduced representation sequence data. The reliability of variants called with the workflow is verified by comparison with genetically mappable variants from an independent sorghum experimental cross. Comparison with a recent sorghum resequencing study shows that the workflow identifies an additional 1.62 million high-confidence variants from the same sequence data. Finally, the workflow’s performance is validated using Arabidopsis sequence data, yielding variant call sets with 95% sensitivity and 99% positive predictive value. The Recalibration and Interrelation of genomic sequence data with the GATK (RIG) workflow enables the GATK to accurately identify genetic variation in organisms lacking validated variant resources.