Haplogrep 3-an interactive haplogroup classification and analysis platform

Abstract

Over the last decade, Haplogrep has become a standard tool for haplogroup classification in the field of human mitochondrial DNA and is widely used by medical, forensic, and evolutionary researchers. Haplogrep scales well for thousands of samples, supports many file formats and provides an intuitive graphical web interface. Nevertheless, the currently available version has limitations when applying it to large biobank-scale data. In this paper, we present a major upgrade to the software by adding (a) haplogroup summary statistics and variant annotations from various publicly available genome databases, (b) an interface to connect new phylogenetic trees, (c) a new state-of-The-Art web framework managing large scale data, (d) algorithmic adaptions to improve FASTA classification using BWA-specific alignment rules and (e) a pre-classification quality control step for VCF samples. These improvements will give researchers the opportunity to classify thousands of samples as usual but providing additional ways to investigate the dataset directly in the browser. The web service and its documentation can be accessed freely without any registration at https://haplogrep.i-med.ac.at.