Necessity to Sort Bam

[eprdz]

Hello,
I am using the Whole Genome Germline Single Sample workflow for big WGS experiments. I notices that the task of sorting bam after MarkDuplicates is consuming from 60% to 80% of the execution time of the workflow. I was wondering if this step is 100% necessary and if it is some possibility to speed this process for example using samtools sort instead of Picard SortSam.

Thank you in advance.

[jessicaway]

Hi @eprdz,

I believe the sorting is needed for downstream steps, but @kachulis may be able to comment.

For sorting tools, yes, samtools sort is in fact faster than SortSam (especially running in parallel). We hope to get to optimization of our WGS pipeline soon, however that work is likely on the order of months rather than weeks for our team. Feel free to fork the repo and make the changes you need in the meantime