Please Note: Transition to Strelka2

There is no support or ongoing development for the Isaac Variant Caller package, please instead see our ongoing updates to germline-calling in Strelka2, featuring substantially improved accuracy, GPLv3 source licensing, multi-sample support and more:

https://github.com/Illumina/strelka

Isaac Variant Caller -- 1.0.7

Christopher Saunders (csaunders@illumina.com)

Isaac Variant Caller (IVC) is an analysis package designed to detect SNVs and small indels from the aligned sequencing reads of a single diploid sample.

For additional information, please see:

https://github.com/sequencing

WORKFLOW SUMMARY:

The workflow requires aligned sequencing reads in the BAM file format. These reads must be sorted and indexed. PCR duplicate removal is recommended. IVC does its own read realignment around indels so it is not necessary to pre-process the data with any such step.

The output of the workflow is a single Genome VCF (gVCF) file describing all sites and indels in the genome. gVCF is a set of conventions for output in the VCF 4.1 format to represent all sites in the genome. More information and gVCF processing utilities are maintained at the following site:

https://sites.google.com/site/gvcftools/

For applications where only the variant calls are required, it is recommended that only the passed variants (or a subset thereof) are used. One way these can be extracted from the output is with the 'extract_variants' tool in the gvcftools package:

gzip -dc my_sample.genome.vcf.gz |\
extract_variants |\
awk '/^#/ || $7 == "PASS"' >\
all_passed_variants.vcf

INSTALLATION:

The IVC workflow is designed to run on *nux-like platforms. It has been specifically tested on the following distributions:

Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09
Centos 5.3
Centos 6.2
Mac OS X 10.5
Ubuntu 11.10
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

For Centos/Amazon Linux and other rpm-based distributions, the following packages (and their dependencies) are known requirements on top of the base Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09:

make
gcc
gcc-c++
zlib
zlib-devel

For Ubuntu and other Debian package distributions, the following packages (and their dependencies) are known requirements on top of the base Ubuntu 11.10 distribution:

g++
zlib1g-dev

Other compilation and runtime prerequisites are included in the distribution tarball. These included prerequisites are:

boost 1.44 (modified to include only a subset of the library)
samtools 0.1.18 (modified to remove the 'curses' requirement)
bgzf_extras 0.1
codemin 1.0.2
tabix 0.2.5 (makefile modified to reorder libz library to last place, as required for Ubuntu 12 build)

The Makefile included in the IVC workflow tarball will compile both the included prerequisite packages and the variant caller itself. To do this, go to the root of the isaac_variant_caller_workflow directory tree and run ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR followed by make.

Example build:

tar -xzf isaac_variant_caller_workflow.tar.gz
cd isaac_variant_caller_workflow
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLATION_DIR
make

If the installation succeeds, all files will be installed to $INSTALLATION_DIR

The final installation step is to run the workflow on the demostration data included in the distribution. Running the demo can be used to verify that the workflow completes and produces the expected answer. To do this, first complete the installation steps above. Then, given a IVC installation path of $IVC_INSTALL_DIR, execute the following script:

$IVC_INSTALL_DIR/bin/demo/run_demo.bash

The demo will create a 'ivcDemoAnalysis' directory under the current working directory, then run an analysis for a very small genomic region from a hapmap sample. It should complete in less than a minute. If the demo script succeeds, you should see the following lines as the final output:

**** No differences between expected and computed results.


**** Demo/verification successfully completed

CONFIGURATION & ANALYSIS:

An IVC run is accomplished in two steps: (1) configuration and (2) analysis.

The configuration is a fast step designed to setup the run and perform some preliminary validation (eg. check that the chromosome names match in the BAM header and reference genome). The configuration will create a makefile to control the analysis and a directory structure to hold all intermediate and final results. All configuration output is written to the analysis directory. This step requires a configuration initialization file containing IVC's default parameters. Template configuration files can be found in the etc/ subdirectory under the workflow installation root (see example run setup below).

Following configuration, the makefile can be used to run the analysis itself using make, qmake, or a similar tool.

Example run:

# example location where strelka was installed:
#
IVC_INSTALL_DIR=/opt/isaac_variant_caller_workflow

# example location where analysis will be run:
#
WORK_DIR=/data/myWork

# Step 1. Move to working directory:
#
cd $WORK_DIR

# Step 2. Copy configuration ini file from default template set to a local copy,
#         possibly edit settings in local copy of file. In this example the
#         default configuration for whole genome sequencing is used. A
#         second default configuration exists for exome/targeted sequencing.
#
cp $IVC_INSTALL_DIR/etc/ivc_config_default_wgs.ini config.ini

# Step 3. Configure:
#
$IVC_INSTALL_DIR/bin/configureWorkflow.pl --bam=/data/input.bam --ref=/data/reference/hg19.fa --config=config.ini --output-dir=./myAnalysis

# Step 4. Run Analysis
#         This example is run using 8 cores on the local host:
#
cd ./myAnalysis
make -j 8

CONFIGURATION DETAILS:

IVC includes a second default configuration file for exome/targeted sequencing -- the only difference to WGS calling is that IVC's high depth filters are turned off for this case. IVC high depth filtration is designed to remove pericentromeric reference compression artifacts in WGS runs, but is not applicable for targeted sequencing.

To use the exome/targeted configuration replace step 2 above with:

cp $IVC_INSTALL_DIR/etc/ivc_config_default_wes.ini config.ini

sequencing / isaac_variant_caller