insiM: in silico Mutator Software for Bioinformatics Pipeline Validation of Clinical Next-Generation Sequencing Assays

Lack of reliable reference samples containing different mutations of interest across large sets of disease-relevant loci limits the extensive validation clinical next-generation sequencing (NGS) assays and their associated bioinformatics pipelines. Herein, we have generated a publicly available, highly flexible tool, in silico Mutator (insiM), to introduce point mutations, insertions, deletions, and duplications of any size into real data sets of amplicon-based or hybrid-capture NGS assays. insiM accepts an alignment file along with target territory and produces paired-end FASTQ files containing specified mutations via modification of original sequencing reads.