Hello,
I am wondering whether MuSiC uses soft-clipped bases in its coverage and background mutation rate calculations.
I have generated somatic variant calls from WES tumor/normal pairs using MuTect2 with the --dontUseSoftClippedBases option, and I want to be sure that the coverage used for the bmr calculation matches the coverage that was actually used for calling variants. I'm not sure if I need to trim these bases out of the bam files before passing them to MuSiC, or if they would be ignored anyway.
Thank you for your help!
Best regards, Kate
1 answer
I believe that the answer is no, as it's using the samtools libraries, and those do not return soft-clipped bases by default, IIRC. That said, it'd be easy to verify. Extract a dozen reads from a region of your bam file, choose a position that has both soft-clipped and non-soft-clipped bases, then run the tool just on that bam and that site. Also, the calcRoiCovg code is here, if it helps: https://github.com/ding-lab/calc-roi-covg/blob/master/calcRoiCovg.c
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