Variant Annotation and Functional Prediction: SnpEff

Abstract

Variant annotations, in general, refer to the process of information enrichment of genomic variants from a sequencing experiment. Typically these annotations include functional predictions, such as predicting the amino acid sequence changes from the DNA variant, predicting whether the variant will induce a splice anomaly, or predicting nonsense mediated decay. But other annotations also include combining with genomic databases, adding conservation scores, or comparing to allele frequencies from large population databases. Finally, all these annotations are combined to prioritize and filter variants into a reduced set of highly relevant variants for the study or clinical assay.