If you don’t want to analyse your variants on external servers or have more than 1000 or so to annotate, you probably want to use the VEP script. Setting it up might not always be straightforward as there are dependencies you need, but the installation script takes away a lot of the trouble.
Tag: VEP
Cool stuff the VEP can do: custom annotation
Trixie the Triceratops
Ensembl produce high quality gene annotation for a number of species, but getting it to the high quality we expect takes time. This means there are many species and strains where we don’t have annotation yet. If you’re working with a species without Ensembl annotation (like Trixie the Triceratops here) or even a specific strain that we don’t have, you can still make use of VEP for predicting the effect of variants on genes and transcripts, using your own annotation. All you need is a GFF or GTF of the transcripts, and a FASTA file of the genome.
The new Ensembl regulatory build for mouse
You may have heard us squeaking about our new mouse regulatory build in our Ensembl 93 release blog. If you’re interested in finding out what exactly a ‘regulatory build’ is, and how to view and download this data in Ensembl, then this is the blog for you!
Cool stuff the VEP can do: normalisation
One of the biggest headaches when working with insertions and deletions is how many different ways you can represent the same variant. If you’re looking to find out if there’s already known allele frequencies or phenotypes at a locus, you want to make sure that you find the right one. The VEP can take that headache away through normalisation of variants.
Cool stuff the VEP can do: optimisation
Some Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) jobs are small, just ten or fewer variants, and that’s easy. Some VEP jobs are big, if you do variant calling on one whole human genome, that’s five million variants! The more variants you have, the more computing power the VEP needs to process them, which can make it slow. But there are ways to speed it up.