By delangel
For a discussion of the implications of removing indel realignment from workflows, see Blog#7847 from June 2016.
For a complete, detailed argument reference, refer to the GATK document page here.
For a complete, detailed argument reference, refer to the GATK document page here.
While we advocate for using the Indel Realigner over an aggregated bam using the full Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm, it will work for just a single lane of sequencing data when run in -knownsOnly mode. Novel sites obviously won't be cleaned up, but the majority of a single individual's short indels will already have been seen in dbSNP and/or 1000 Genomes. One would employ the known-only/lane-level realignment strategy in a large-scale project (e.g. 1000 Genomes) where computation time is severely constrained and limited. We modify the example arguments from above to reflect the command-lines necessary for known-only/lane-level cleaning.
The RealignerTargetCreator step would need to be done just once for a single set of indels; so as long as the set of known indels doesn't change, the output.intervals file from below would never need to be recalculated.
java -Xmx1g -jar /path/to/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \ -T RealignerTargetCreator \ -R /path/to/reference.fasta \ -o /path/to/output.intervals \ -known /path/to/indel_calls.vcf
The IndelRealigner step needs to be run on every bam file.
java -Xmx4g -Djava.io.tmpdir=/path/to/tmpdir \ -jar /path/to/GenomeAnalysisTK.jar \ -I <lane-level.bam> \ -R <ref.fasta> \ -T IndelRealigner \ -targetIntervals <intervalListFromStep1Above.intervals> \ -o <realignedBam.bam> \ -known /path/to/indel_calls.vcf --consensusDeterminationModel KNOWNS_ONLY \ -LOD 0.4