Working with a collaborator from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, members of the Erlich Lab team at the New York Genome Center have developed a novel algorithm called HipSTR (Haplotype Inference and Phasing for STRs). The tool improves accuracy in the study of short tandem repeats (STRs), which are repeated DNA sequences, that play a pivotal role in multiple genetic diseases, population genetics applications and forensic casework.
Their work was published in the paper Genome-wide profiling of heritable and de novo STR variations, published in Nature Methods on April 24.
HipSTR is freely available at https://hipstr-tool.github.io/HipSTR.