A platform-independent mutation caller for targeted, exome, and whole-genome resequencing data generated on Illumina, SOLiD, Life/PGM, Roche/454, and similar instruments. The newest version, VarScan 2, is written in Java, so it runs on most operating systems. It can be used to detect different types of variation: 1) germline variants (SNPs and indels) in individual samples or pools of samples, 2) multi-sample variants (shared or private) in multi-sample datasets (with mpileup), 3) somatic mutations, LOH events, and germline variants in tumor-normal pairs and 4) somatic copy number alterations (CNAs) in tumor-normal exome data.