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What is the difference between different releases of dbSNP?

My question is really as simple as the title, but in particular, I'm interested in the following dimensions:

  1. Is dbSNP backwards compatible? Are new releases always supersets of old releases? Are existing records updated with subsequent releases?
  2. If I annotate two sets of variants (in VCF) with different dbSNP versions, can I compare the two or do they have to be annotated with the same version of dbSNP in order to be meaningful?

A little background: we have existing variant calling pipelines for genomic and transcriptomic data using dbSNP releases as far back as 132 and I'm trying to standardize and update them.

Thanks in advance.

vcf annotation snp databases ncbi
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updated by Ram Ram • written by Morgan • Morgan

1 answer

  1. No, some records are merged: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/books/NBK44468/ e.g: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=56500751
  2. Same as 1) if you find a #rs at a given CHROM/POS, it might not be the same #rs-id in the new version of dbsnp.
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updated by Ram Ram • written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum

Follow up question: Are the new releases better enough to consider reannotating everything?

I guess this is a silly question since why would there be new releases if they weren't better!

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written by Morgan • Morgan

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