Nuclear integration of mitochondrial genomes and retrocopied
transcript insertion are biologically important but often-overlooked
aspects of structural variant (SV) annotation. While tools for their
detection exist, these typically rely on reanalysis of primary data
using specialised detectors rather than leveraging calls from general
purpose structural variant callers. Such reanalysis potentially leads to
additional computational expense and does not take advantage of advances
in general purpose structural variant calling. Here, we present svaRetro
and svaNUMT; R packages that provide functions for annotating novel
genomic events, such as nonreference retrocopied transcripts and nuclear
integration of mitochondrial DNA. The packages were developed to work
within the Bioconductor framework. We evaluate the performance of these
packages to detect events using simulations and public benchmarking
datasets, and annotate processed transcripts in a public structural
variant database. svaRetro and svaNUMT provide modular, SV-caller
agnostic tools for downstream annotation of structural variant
calls.