MOTIVATION: The accurate and sensitive identification of de novo variants, which are unique to an individual and not found in the parents' germlines, is critical for understanding the genetic basis of rare diseases, developmental disorders, and evolutionary processes. Existing de novo variant detection pipelines often lack the flexibility to handle multiple variant types, struggle with speed and reproducibility across computational environments, demand extensive manual configuration, or require bioinformatics expertise for downstream curation and analysis, limiting their scalability and usability for large genomic studies. Accordingly, there is a pressing need to better address these challenges. RESULTS: We introduce TriosCompass, an open-source Snakemake workflow that addresses these challenges by providing a modular, accelerated, and environmentally-configurable end-to-end solution for comprehensive de novo variant discovery. It integrates state-of-the-art tools into a reproducible framework, empowering researchers to discover novel genetic insights with greater efficiency and reliability. AVAILABILITY: TriosCompass is implemented as a Snakemake workflow and is freely available at https://github.com/NCI-CGR/TriosCompass_v2 or on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.17981062). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data is available on GitHub at https://github.com/NCI-CGR/TriosCompass_v2/tree/manuscript/report_dashboards. Supplementary methods on DeepTrio benchmark runs can be viewed at: https://github.com/NCI-CGR/TriosCompass_v2/blob/manuscript/TriosCompass_Supp_Methods_deeptrio_benchmark.md.

BACKGROUND: Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a common sexually transmitted infection associated with cervical cancer that frequently occurs as a coinfection of types and subtypes. Highly similar sublineages that show over 100-fold differences in cancer risk are not distinguishable in coinfections with current typing methods. RESULTS: We describe an efficient set of computational tools, rkmh, for analyzing complex mixed infections of related viruses based on sequence data. rkmh makes extensive use of MinHash similarity measures, and includes utilities for removing host DNA and classifying reads by type, lineage, and sublineage. We show that rkmh is capable of assigning reads to their HPV type as well as HPV16 lineage and sublineages. CONCLUSIONS: Accurate read classification enables estimates of percent composition when there are multiple infecting lineages or sublineages. While we demonstrate rkmh for HPV with multiple sequencing technologies, it is also applicable to other mixtures of related sequences.

BACKGROUND: SNP genotyping microarrays have revolutionized the study of complex disease. The current range of commercially available genotyping products contain extensive catalogues of low frequency and rare variants. Existing SNP calling algorithms have difficulty dealing with these low frequency variants, as the underlying models rely on each genotype having a reasonable number of observations to ensure accurate clustering. RESULTS: Here we develop KRLMM, a new method for converting raw intensities into genotype calls that aims to overcome this issue. Our method is unique in that it applies careful between sample normalization and allows a variable number of clusters k (1, 2 or 3) for each SNP, where k is predicted using the available data. We compare our method to four genotyping algorithms (GenCall, GenoSNP, Illuminus and OptiCall) on several Illumina data sets that include samples from the HapMap project where the true genotypes are known in advance. All methods were found to have high overall accuracy (> 98%), with KRLMM consistently amongst the best. At low minor allele frequency, the KRLMM, OptiCall and GenoSNP algorithms were observed to be consistently more accurate than GenCall and Illuminus on our test data. CONCLUSIONS: Methods that tailor their approach to calling low frequency variants by either varying the number of clusters (KRLMM) or using information from other SNPs (OptiCall and GenoSNP) offer improved accuracy over methods that do not (GenCall and Illuminus). The KRLMM algorithm is implemented in the open-source crlmm package distributed via the Bioconductor project (http://www.bioconductor.org).