Good quality control metrics to look out for when someone gives you BAMs
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4.2 years ago
curious ▴ 750

Someone sent me some BAMs and that is all they sent, so I don't exactly know if they are analysis ready

After some googling I ran Qualimap on all the BAMs. I am wondering what the major QC metrics are to look out for

Mapping rate seemed to be the most obvious to me, looks north of 99% for the most part.

The other main things I seem to read about is duplication rate. It sounds like a high duplication rate could be produced by PCR artifacts. Qulalimap reports Duplicated reads (flagged) at around 13ish % for many samples.

There are quite a few other metrics, but I am trying to figure out which ones would raise big red flags when looking at BAMs? Is it mostly mapping and duplication rate?

bam qc • 1.1k views
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What quality metrics to look for, besides general run-specific metrics from the reads (e.g., the distribution of base qualities), will depend strongly on what's actually in the BAMs - WGS, WES, capture, amplicons, etc. For example, a high duplication rate may suggest libraries were overamplified for WES and should be deduped, whereas this is entirely expected for a panel of short amplicons (and you may not be able to dedup these).

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The way I read this, 13% of my reads are duplicated, is this high for WES (which is what these are from)?

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No, that's quite good as far as I've seen. Removing them may help reduce false positives from your variant calling, and you won't lose much information by doing so.

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Thank you very much!

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