Minimizer Success - Disk-based Genome Sequencing Data Compression

In 2014 The Year of Minimizers in Bioinformatics, we covered a number of applications of minimizers and more keep coming. Readers will enjoy this newly posted paper in arxiv.

Disk-based genome sequencing data compression

We propose ORCOM (Overlapping Reads COmpression with Minimizers), a compression algorithm dedicated to sequencing reads (DNA only). Most compressors for such data, usually in FASTQ format, cannot efficiently compress the DNA stream if a given dataset is large, since the redundancy between overlapping reads cannot be easily exploited in the main memory, often a few times smaller than the amount of data to compress. More interesting solutions for this problem are disk-based~\cite{Y2011,CBJR2012}, where the better of these two, from Cox~et al.~\cite{CBJR2012}, is based on the Burrows –Wheeler transform (BWT) and achieves 0.484\,bits per base for a 135.3\,Gbp human genome sequencing collection with 45-fold coverage. Our method makes use of a conceptually simple and easily parallelizable idea of minimizers, to obtain 0.376\,bits per base as the compression ratio.

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and our nameless blog gets cited too !