What it does
Not all candidate LoF variants are created equal. For e.g, a nonsense (stop gain) variant impacting the first 5% of a polypeptide is far more likely to be deleterious than one affecting the last 5%. Assuming you’ve annotated your VCF with snpEff v3.0+, the lof_sieve tool reports the fractional position (e.g. 0.05 for the first 5%) of the mutation in the amino acid sequence. In addition, it also reports the predicted function of the transcript so that one can segregate candidate LoF variants that affect protein_coding transcripts from processed RNA, etc.
Citation
If you use GEMINI in your research, please cite the following manuscript: