vibe-vep

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A lightweight variant effect predictor for cBioPortal, Genome Nexus, and OncoKB

vibe-vep is a single Go binary with no Perl dependencies that predicts variant consequences using GENCODE annotations (~95MB download vs 17GB VEP cache).

It incorporates transcript prioritization similar to Genome Nexus — selecting a single gene and protein change by prioritizing coding transcripts and highest-impact consequences — while also providing effect predictions for all overlapping transcripts.

Achieves 99.8% concordance with GDC/VEP annotations across 1M+ TCGA variants.

Fast

~14,000 variants/sec parallel (4 workers), ~5,000 single-threaded. Cache loading in ~25 seconds for 254k GENCODE v46 transcripts.

Validated

Tested against 7 TCGA GDC studies (1,052,366 variants). 99.8% consequence match rate, 0 cancer gene mismatches.

Multiple Data Sources

AlphaMissense, ClinVar, Cancer Hotspots, SIGNAL, and OncoKB annotation sources. Extensible architecture for adding new sources.

Key Features

  • VCF/MAF Parsing: Annotate variants from VCF or MAF files
  • GENCODE Annotations: Uses GENCODE GTF/FASTA (~95MB download vs 17GB VEP cache)
  • Consequence Prediction: Classifies variants using Sequence Ontology terms
  • Validation Mode: Compare existing MAF annotations against predictions
  • VCF to MAF Conversion: Convert VCF files to MAF format with annotations
  • Annotation Sources: AlphaMissense, ClinVar, Cancer Hotspots, SIGNAL, OncoKB