We present Genozip, a universal and fully featured compression software for genomic data. Genozip is designed to be a general-purpose software and a development framework for genomic compression by providing five core capabilities – universality (support for all common genomic file formats), high compression ratios, speed, feature-richness, and extensibility. Genozip delivers high-performance compression for widely-used genomic data formats in genomics research, namely FASTQ, SAM/BAM/CRAM, VCF, GVF, FASTA, PHYLIP, and 23andMe formats. Our test results show that Genozip is fast and achieves greatly improved compression ratios, even when the files are already compressed. Further, Genozip is architected with a separation of the Genozip Framework from file-format-specific Segmenters and data-type-specific Codecs. With this, we intend for Genozip to be a general-purpose compression platform where researchers can implement compression for additional file formats, as well as new codecs for data types or fields within files, in the future. We anticipate that this will ultimately increase the visibility and adoption of these algorithms by the user community, thereby accelerating further innovation in this space. Availability: Genozip is written in C. The code is open-source and available on GitHub (https://github.com/divonlan/genozip). The package is free for non-commercial use. It is distributed as a Docker container on DockerHub and through the conda package manager. Genozip is tested on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
We introduce Dual Coordinate VCF (DVCF), a file format that records genomic variants against two different reference genomes simultaneously and is fully compliant with the current VCF specification. As implemented in the Genozip platform, DVCF enables bioinformatics pipelines to seamlessly operate across two coordinate systems by leveraging the system most advantageous to each pipeline step, simplifying bioinformatics workflows and reducing file generation and associated data storage burden. Moreover, our benchmarking of Genozip DVCF shows that it produces more complete, less erroneous, and less biased translations across coordinate systems than two widely used alternative tools (i.e., LiftoverVcf and CrossMap).Availability and ImplementationGenozip is free for academic use. Documentation is available on https://genozip.com/dvcf.html. Genozip user manual is available on https://genozip.com/manual.html. The source code is available on https://genozip.com/source.html. The scripts for reproducing the benchmarks are available on https://github.com/divonlan/genozip-dvcf-results.
Genozip performs compression of a wide range of genomic data, including widely used FASTQ, BAM and VCF file formats. Here, we introduce the latest advancement in Genozip technology, focused on compression of BAM and CRAM files. We demonstrate Genozip's ability to compress data generated by a variety of study types (e.g., whole genome sequencing, DNA methylation, RNASeq), sequencing technologies and aligners, up to 2.7 times better than the current state of the art compressor, CRAM version 3.1.
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