Advances in sequencing technologies and computational algorithms have enabled the study of genomic variants to dissect their functional consequence. Despite this unprecedented progress, current tools fail to reliably detect and characterize more complex allelic variants, such as short tandem repeats (STRs). We developed TSSV as an efficient and sensitive tool to specifically profile all allelic variants present in targeted loci. Based on its design, requiring only two short flanking sequences, TSSV can work without the use of a complete reference sequence to reliably profile highly polymorphic, repetitive or uncharacterized regions.