Operationalizing Quality Assurance for Clinical Illumina Somatic Next-Generation Sequencing Pipelines

Quality assurance (QA) is essential for precision oncology workflows, in particular in the clinical setting. However, because of numerous variations in laboratory and bioinformatics pipelines, QA practices remain non-standardized, are often ad hoc, and are lacking longitudinal tracking. A selected review of existing software was performed for quality control of Illumina next-generation sequencing data, focusing specifically on generalizable tools that can be integrated into any bioinformatics workflow to easily develop a QA workflow with longitudinal tracking. Although all implementations need to be integrated, validated, and iterated upon to suit individual operations, providing a base suite of options will enable better validation and use of QA in clinical somatic mutation testing for workflows using Illumina next-generation sequencing and beyond.