SNP calling by sequencing pooled samples

Abstract

We present a software which helps in calling SNPs in pooled samples: it has good power while retaining a low false discovery rate (FDR). The method also provides the posterior probability that a SNP is segregating and the full posterior distribution of f for every SNP. In order to test the behaviour of our software, we generated (through simulated coalescence) artificial genomes and computed the effect of a pooled sequencing protocol, followed by SNP calling. In this setting, snape has better power and False Discovery Rate (FDR) than the comparable packages samtools, PoPoolation, Varscan : for N = 50 chromosomes, snape has power ≈ 35%and FDR ≈ 2.5%. snape is available at http://code.google.com/p/snape-pooled/ (source code and precompiled binaries).