Hi we've been looking at results of a recent run of GATK-HC (3.1-1) using the new N1 pipeline and we've been seeing something odd in the distribution of the Depth of Coverage (Using DP from the Genotype Fields) we're seeing for the raw unfiltered variants.
All our samples are sequenced using PCR-Free libraries and have two lanes of sequence (~24x mapped depth) and looking at depth of coverage from bedtools we see a nice clean distribution (red in graph) but when we look at the data from the HaplotypeCaller sites (Blue in graph) we see a bimodal distribution with an excess of variants called at lower coverage (~16x) vs the most common coverage of around 24x. We've seen this in all the samples we've looked at so far, so it's not just a one off.
I've had a quick look at read depth from another variant caller (Platypus) and there we see no evidence of this bimodal distribution in the variants it has called.
Is this expected behaviour? If so why does it occur? If not any idea what is going on here, is it a bug in the variant caller or the depth statistics? Do you see the same thing in other datasets?
Thanks!