SUMMARY: BreakPoint Surveyor (BPS) is a computational pipeline for the discovery, characterization, and visualization of complex genomic rearrangements, such as viral genome integration, in paired-end sequence data. BPS facilitates interpretation of structural variants by merging structural variant breakpoint predictions, gene exon structure, read depth, and RNA-sequencing expression into a single comprehensive figure. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code and sample data freely available for download at https://github.com/ding-lab/BreakPointSurveyor, distributed under the GNU GPLv3 license, implemented in R, Python and BASH scripts, and supported on Unix/Linux/OS X operating systems. CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

In this work, we present the Genome Modeling System (GMS), an analysis information management system capable of executing automated genome analysis pipelines at a massive scale. The GMS framework provides detailed tracking of samples and data coupled with reliable and repeatable analysis pipelines. The GMS also serves as a platform for bioinformatics development, allowing a large team to collaborate on data analysis, or an individual researcher to leverage the work of others effectively within its data management system. Rather than separating ad-hoc analysis from rigorous, reproducible pipelines, the GMS promotes systematic integration between the two. As a demonstration of the GMS, we performed an integrated analysis of whole genome, exome and transcriptome sequencing data from a breast cancer cell line (HCC1395) and matched lymphoblastoid line (HCC1395BL). These data are available for users to test the software, complete tutorials and develop novel GMS pipeline configurations. The GMS is available at https://github.com/genome/gms.

MOTIVATION: Microsatellite instability (MSI) is an important indicator of larger genome instability and has been linked to many genetic diseases, including Lynch syndrome. MSI status is also an independent prognostic factor for favorable survival in multiple cancer types, such as colorectal and endometrial. It also informs the choice of chemotherapeutic agents. However, the current PCR-electrophoresis-based detection procedure is laborious and time-consuming, often requiring visual inspection to categorize samples. We developed MSIsensor, a C++ program for automatically detecting somatic microsatellite changes. It computes length distributions of microsatellites per site in paired tumor and normal sequence data, subsequently using these to statistically compare observed distributions in both samples. Comprehensive testing indicates MSIsensor is an efficient and effective tool for deriving MSI status from standard tumor-normal paired sequence data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/ding-lab/msisensor

MOTIVATION: DNA copy number aberration (CNA) is a hallmark of genomic abnormality in tumor cells. Recurrent CNA (RCNA) occurs in multiple cancer samples across the same chromosomal region and has greater implication in tumorigenesis. Current commonly used methods for RCNA identification require CNA calling for individual samples before cross-sample analysis. This two-step strategy may result in a heavy computational burden, as well as a loss of the overall statistical power due to segmentation and discretization of individual sample's data. We propose a population-based approach for RCNA detection with no need of single-sample analysis, which is statistically powerful, computationally efficient and particularly suitable for high-resolution and large-population studies. RESULTS: Our approach, correlation matrix diagonal segmentation (CMDS), identifies RCNAs based on a between-chromosomal-site correlation analysis. Directly using the raw intensity ratio data from all samples and adopting a diagonal transformation strategy, CMDS substantially reduces computational burden and can obtain results very quickly from large datasets. Our simulation indicates that the statistical power of CMDS is higher than that of single-sample CNA calling based two-step approaches. We applied CMDS to two real datasets of lung cancer and brain cancer from Affymetrix and Illumina array platforms, respectively, and successfully identified known regions of CNA associated with EGFR, KRAS and other important oncogenes. CMDS provides a fast, powerful and easily implemented tool for the RCNA analysis of large-scale data from cancer genomes.

Abstract Summary: Massively parallel sequencing technologies hold incredible promise for the study of DNA sequence variation, particularly the identification of variants affecting human disease. The unprecedented throughput and relatively short read lengths of Roche/454, Illumina/Solexa, and other platforms have spurred development of a new generation of sequence alignment algorithms. Yet detection of sequence variants based on short read alignments remains challenging, and most currently available tools are limited to a single platform or aligner type. We present VarScan, an open source tool for variant detection that is compatible with several short read aligners. We demonstrate VarScan's ability to detect SNPs and indels with high sensitivity and specificity, in both Roche/454 sequencing of individuals and deep Illumina/Solexa sequencing of pooled samples. Availability and Implementation: Source code and documentation freely available at http://genome.wustl.edu/tools/cancer-genomics implemented as a Perl package and supported on Linux/UNIX, MS Windows and Mac OSX. Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.