A portable recalibration workflow for reference-based variant calling in non-human genomes

A key computational step in reference-based variant calling is distinguishing true genetic variants from sequencing errors. Advanced tools and workflows have been developed to handle this by computational modelling of technical errors from the sequencing machines. However, these recalibration workflows have largely been evaluated for human data only and its exact applicability for non-human data remains unknown. Here, we conducted a systematic evaluation of variant calling on human, rice, sheep, and chickpea data, and found that existing workflows introduce unexpected statistical bias, thus leading to suboptimal variant calls for non-human data. To address this problem, we present simple guidelines for constructing a "pseudo-"database (pseudoDB) of genetic variants as a scalable and portable solution for recalibration and variant calling. With human data, our pseudoDB-based workflow performs comparably to existing dbSNP-based GATK3 workflows and those using DeepVariant, Strelka2, and FreeBayes. We extend this to other non-human genomes, namely cattle, brown bear, swan goose, African oil palm, Komodo dragon, and stevia, altogether resulting in the identification of up to 242.0% unique genetic variants. The majority of newly identified variants are within the non-coding regions, hinting at the rich diversity of genome regulation in the non-human population. Our pseudoDB-based workflow is agnostic to reference genomes and modular for easy integration with other computational workflows for human and non-human resequencing data.