mosdepth: quick coverage calculation for genomes and exomes

Abstract

Mosdepth is a new command-line tool for rapidly calculating genome-wide sequencing coverage. It measures depth from BAM (Li et al. 2009) or CRAM files at either each nucleotide position in a genome or for sets of genomic regions. Genomic regions may be specified as either a BED file to evaluate coverage across capture regions, or as a fixed-size window as required for copy-number calling. Mosdepth uses a simple algorithm that is computationally efficient and enables it to quickly produce optional coverage summaries. We demonstrate that mosdepth is faster than existing tools and provides flexibility in the types of coverage profiles produced.