Genome-wide profiling of heritable and de novo STR variations

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are highly variable elements that play a pivotal role in multiple genetic diseases, population genetics applications, and forensic casework. However, it has proven problematic to genotype STRs from high-throughput sequencing data. Here, we describe HipSTR, a novel haplotype-based method for robustly genotyping and phasing STRs from Illumina sequencing data, and we report a genome-wide analysis and validation of de novo STR mutations. HipSTR is freely available at https://hipstr-tool.github.io/HipSTR.