BINSEQ Format Specification

Overview

BINSEQ is a binary file format family designed for efficient storage and processing of DNA sequences. They make use of two-bit encoding for nucleotides and are optimized for high-performance parallel processing.

BINSEQ currently has two flavors:

1. BQ: (*.bq) files are for fixed-length records without quality scores.
2. VBQ: (*.vbq) files are for variable-length records with optional quality scores.

Both flavors support both single and paired sequences.

Getting Started

This is a library for reading and writing BINSEQ files, for a command-line interface see bqtools.

To get started please refer to our documentation. For example programs which make use of the library check out our examples directory.

For more information about the BINSEQ file family, please refer to our preprint.