Benchmarking the performance of Pool-seq SNP callers using simulated and real sequencing data

Population genomics is a fast-developing discipline with promising applications in a growing number of life sciences fields. Advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics tools allow population genomics to exploit genome-wide information to identify the molecular variants underlying traits of interest and the evolutionary forces that modulate these variants through space and time. However, the cost of genomic analyses of multiple populations is still too high to address them through individual genome sequencing. Pooling individuals for sequencing can be a more effective strategy in Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) detection and allele frequency estimation because of a higher total coverage. However, compared to individual sequencing, SNP calling from pools has the additional difficulty of distinguishing rare variants from sequencing errors, which is often avoided by establishing a minimum threshold allele frequency for the analysis. Finding an optimal balance between minimizing information loss and reducing sequencing costs is essential to ensure the success of population genomics studies. Here, we have benchmarked the performance of SNP callers for Pool-seq data, based on different approaches, under different conditions, and using computer simulations and real data. We found that SNP callers performance varied for allele frequencies up to 0.35. We also found that SNP callers based on Bayesian (SNAPE-pooled) or maximum likelihood (MAPGD) approaches outperform the two heuristic callers tested (VarScan and PoolSNP), in terms of the balance between sensitivity and FDR both in simulated and sequencing data. Our results will help inform the selection of the most appropriate SNP caller not only for large-scale population studies but also in cases where the Pool-seq strategy is the only option, such as in metagenomic or polyploid studies.