Comparison of structural variant callers for massive whole-genome sequence data

Background: Detecting structural variations (SVs) at the population level using next-generation sequencing (NGS) requires substantial computational resources and processing time. Here, we compared the performances of 10 SV callers: Delly, Manta, GridSS, Wham, Sniffles, Lumpy, SvABA, Canvas, CNVnator, and MELT. These SV callers have been recently published and have been widely employed for processing massive whole-genome sequencing datasets. We evaluated the accuracy, sequence depth, running time, and memory usage of the SV callers. Results Notably, several callers exhibited better calling performance for deletions than for duplications, inversions, and insertions. Among the SV callers, Manta identified deletion SVs with better performance and efficient computing resources, and both Manta and MELT demonstrated relatively good precision regarding calling insertions. We confirmed that the copy number variation callers, Canvas and CNVnator, exhibited better performance in identifying long duplications as they employ the read-depth approach. Finally, we also verified the genotypes inferred from each SV caller using a phased long-read assembly dataset, and Manta showed the highest concordance in terms of the deletions and insertions. Conclusions Our findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the accuracy and computational efficiency of SV callers, thereby facilitating integrative analysis of SV profiles in diverse large-scale genomic datasets.