snptracker: a swift tool for comprehensive tracking and unifying dbsnp rs ids and genomic coordinates of massive sequence variants

The reference single nucleotide polymorphism (rs) ID in dbSNP (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/) is a key resource identifier, which is widely used in human genetics and genomics studies. However, its application is often complicated by the varied IDs of different versions. Here, we developed a user-friendly tool, SNPTracker, for comprehensively tracking and unifying the rs IDs and genomic coordinates of massive sequence variants at a time. It worked perfectly, and had much higher accuracy and capacity than two alternative utilities in our proof-of-principle examples. SNPTracker will greatly facilitate genetic data exchange and integration in the postgenome-wide association study era.