High-accuracy SNV calling for bacterial isolates using deep learning with AccuSNV.
Accurate detection of mutations within bacterial species is critical for fundamental studies of microbial evolution, reconstruction of transmission events, and identification of antimicrobial resistance mutations. Although many tools have been developed to identify single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) from whole-genome sequencing, they often suffer from high false-positive rates owing to the complexity of bacterial genomes and the need for different filtering cutoffs across sample types and sequencing depths. As data sets increase in size, the manual filtering required for high accuracy presents a significant obstacle. Here, we present AccuSNV, a novel deep learning-based tool for high-precision and automated bacterial SNV calling. Unlike traditional methods that process one sample at a time, AccuSNV leverages a convolutional neural network (CNN) that integrates alignment information across multiple samples, enhancing precision through learned across-sample patterns. We evaluate AccuSNV against seven popular SNV-calling tools using simulated data from six bacterial species with varied sequencing depths, numbers of isolates, mutations, and divergence levels. To further validate its real-world utility, we test AccuSNV on multiple curated bacterial data sets containing reported SNVs. In both simulated and real-world scenarios, AccuSNV consistently achieves the best performance. Moreover, AccuSNV provides comprehensive user-friendly downstream analysis modules and outputs, including mutation annotation information, phylogenetic inference, d N/d S calculations, and optional manual filtering. Together with the automated deep learning-based calling, these features make AccuSNV broadly accessible to users with different levels of computational expertise.