Nucleotide Archival Format (NAF) enables efficient lossless reference-free compression of DNA sequences

摘要

SummaryDNA sequence databases use compression such as gzip to reduce the required storage space and network transmission time. We describe Nucleotide Archival Format (NAF)—a new file format for lossless reference-free compression of FASTA and FASTQ-formatted nucleotide sequences. Nucleotide Archival Format compression ratio is comparable to the best DNA compressors, while providing dramatically faster decompression. We compared our format with DNA compressors: DELIMINATE and MFCompress, and with general purpose compressors: gzip, bzip2, xz, brotli and zstd.