question: Describe Canvas SPW
answer: Whole genome sequencing is becoming a diagnostics of choice for the identification of rare inherited and de novo copy number variants in families with various pediatric and late-onset genetic diseases. Joint variant calling in pedigrees is hampered by the complexity of consensus breakpoint alignment across samples within an arbitrary pedigree structure. Canvas SPW is a tool developed for the identification of inherited and de novo copy number variants from pedigree sequencing data. Canvas SPW supports a number of family structures and provides a wide range of scoring and filtering options to automate and streamline identification of de novo variants. The tool is available for download from https://github.com/Illumina/canvas.