Benchmarking of Sequencing Technologies

We systematically compared sequencing technologies and variant calling pipelines for small variants and structural variants across diverse genomic contexts and sequencing depths. Short-read sequencing combined with DRAGEN achieved high accuracy for single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) and indels in well-mapped and moderately complex regions but showed reduced sensitivity and completeness for structural variant detection. In contrast, long-read sequencing platforms demonstrated clear advantages in detecting structural variants and resolving small variants in difficult genomic regions, although challenges remain in specific indel-prone sequence contexts. Among long-read pipelines, PacBio Revio with DeepVariant achieved the highest SNV and indel accuracy genome-wide, while ONT R10 with DeepVariant performed particularly well in clinically relevant loci. Structural variant detection was dominated by long-read–optimized callers, with SVIM and Sawfish performing best for PacBio, and Sniffles2 and CuteSV2 for ONT, consistently outperforming short-read-based methods across variant classes and sizes. Coverage analyses indicated that long-read sequencing reached accuracy saturation between 20× and 45×, whereas short-read sequencing required more than 60× coverage to approach maximal genome completeness.