Long shot: VEP-cache compatibility

[matthdsm]

Let's face it, VEP is slow and requires a bunch of dependencies that may or may not work.
VCFanno on the other hand is small, compiled and fast, but lacks a predefined, curated cache.

It would be a great boon to the bioinformatics world if vcfanno could be modified to use the wealth of information in the vep cache to supercharge vcf annotations!

Is that something you see happening? Either here or over at Echtvar?

Cheers
Matthias

[brentp]

hmm. let me think about that. I think vep cache is just chunks of tabix indexed stuff, no?
this would be a longer term (like 2026) project but it's possible.

[matthdsm]

AFAIK the vep cache is indeed a bunch of tabix indexed files!
This would be an awesome upgrade of the vcfanno functionality. I can see myself and A LOT of other people really looking forward to this.