PerSVade: personalized structural variation detection in your species of interest

Structural variants (SVs) like translocations, deletions, and other rearrangements underlie genetic and phenotypic variation. SVs are often overlooked due to difficult detection from short-read sequencing. Most algorithms yield low recall on humans, but the performance in other organisms is unclear. Similarly, despite remarkable differences across species genomes, most approaches use parameters optimized for humans. To overcome this and enable species-tailored approaches, we developed perSVade (personalized Structural Variation Detection), a pipeline that identifies SVs in a way that is optimized for any input sample. Starting from short reads, perSVade uses simulations on the reference genome to choose the best SV calling parameters. The output includes the optimally-called SVs and the accuracy, useful to assess the confidence in the results. In addition, perSVade can call small variants and copy-number variations. In summary, perSVade automatically identifies several types of genomic variation from short reads using sample-optimized parameters. We validated that perSVade increases the SV calling accuracy on simulated variants for six diverse eukaryotes, and on datasets of validated human variants. Importantly, we found no universal set of "optimal" parameters, which underscores the need for species-specific parameter optimization. PerSVade will improve our understanding about the role of SVs in non-human organisms.