Audience
Researchers wanting a solution to analyze, manage, and handle genome data
About Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK)
Developed in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute, the toolkit offers a wide variety of tools with a primary focus on variant discovery and genotyping. Its powerful processing engine and high-performance computing features make it capable of taking on projects of any size. The GATK is the industry standard for identifying SNPs and indels in germline DNA and RNAseq data. Its scope is now expanding to include somatic short variant calling and to tackle copy number (CNV) and structural variation (SV). In addition to the variant callers themselves, the GATK also includes many utilities to perform related tasks such as processing and quality control of high-throughput sequencing data and bundles the popular Picard toolkit. These tools were primarily designed to process exomes and whole genomes generated with Illumina sequencing technology, but they can be adapted to handle a variety of other technologies and experimental designs.