A Study of FASTQ/A Compression Techniques

Abstract

Storage for genomic data has grown rapidly in recent years. The RNA sequence of a single human weighs around 200 Gigabytes and it is stored along with the quality scores of these reads in a format called FASTQ or, if said quality scores aren’t included, FASTA. Consequently, there is a real need for developing ever-evolving compression algorithms capable of managing this data. In this work, we present some of the most relevant tools for FASTQ/A compression as the first step toward a new solution that leverages the capabilities of Compact Data Structures (CDS) in bioinformatics.