Intersect-then-combine approach: improving the performance of somatic variant calling in whole exome sequencing data using multiple aligners and callers

Bioinformatic analysis of genomic sequencing data to identify somatic mutations in cancer samples is far from achieving the required robustness and standardisation. In this study we generated a whole exome sequencing benchmark dataset using the platinum genome sample NA12878 and developed an intersect-then-combine (ITC) approach to increase the accuracy in calling single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and indels in tumour-normal pairs. We evaluated the effect of alignment, base quality recalibration, mutation caller and filtering on sensitivity and false positive rate. The ITC approach increased the sensitivity up to 17.1%, without increasing the false positive rate per megabase (FPR/Mb) and its validity was confirmed in a set of clinical samples. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13073-017-0425-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.