Differential Variant Calling — Comparative Somatic Variant Detection

Differential variant calling is a bioinformatics pipeline that identifies genetic variants — single nucleotide variants (SNVs), small insertions/deletions (indels), and structural variants — that are present in one biological sample or condition but absent (or significantly enriched) in a paired reference sample. The canonical application is tumor-versus-normal cancer genomics, where somatic mutations unique to the tumor are distinguished from germline variants shared with normal tissue. The same logic applies to comparing treated vs. untreated cell lines, evolved vs. ancestral strains, or case vs. control cohorts in population genomics.