This leads to more aggressive pairing - more properly paired reads. I have
found a few cases where, for example, read1 is umambiguously mapped to chr20
while its 100bp mate has a perfect match to another chr but has 3 mismatches
and 1 deletion when it is paired with read1 on chr20. With longer reads, it
seems that the chr20 hit is correct, although it is not obvious how this
happened in evolution.
In this case, bwa_fix_xref() will return insane coordinates. The old version
did not check the return status and write wrong CIGAR. This bug only happen to
very short assembly contigs.
The bug only happens when there is a 1bp del and 1bp ins which are close to the
end and there are no other substitutions or indels. In this case, bwa mem gave
a wrong band width.
This move is dangerous as SAM printing is very complex, but it will benefit in
the long run. The planned change will reduce the redundancy, improves clarity
and most importantly makes it much easier to output multiple primary hits in an
optional tag.
The changes after r317 aim to improve the performance and accuracy for very
long query alignment. The short-read alignment should not be affected. The
changes include:
1) Z-dropoff. This is a variant of blast's X-dropoff. I orginally thought this
heuristic only improves speed, but now I realize it also reduces poor
alignment with long good flanking alignments. The difference from blast's
X-dropoff is that Z-dropoff allows big gaps, but X-dropoff does not.
2) Band width doubling. When band width is too small, we will get a poor
alignment in the middle. Sometimes such alignments cannot be fully excluded
with Z-dropoff. Band width doubling is an alternative heuristic. It is based
on the observation that the existing of close-to-boundary high score
possibly implies inadequate band width. When we see such a signal, we double
the band width.
The old version wastefully extends many seeds contained in an aligned region
found before. While this wastes little time for short reads, it becomes a
serious defect for long query sequences.
This is an attempt to fix this problem, but more tuning are needed.
I really hate this: complex and twisted logic for a nasty scenario that almost
never happens to short reads - but it may become serious when the reference
genome consists of many contigs.
On toy examples, the code seems to work. Don't know if it really works...
Heng Li