Introduction
SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map) format is a generic format for storing large nucleotide sequence alignments. SAM aims to be a format that:
- Is flexible enough to store all the alignment information generated by various alignment programs;
- Is simple enough to be easily generated by alignment programs or converted from existing alignment formats;
- Is compact in file size;
- Allows most of operations on the alignment to work on a stream without loading the whole alignment into memory;
- Allows the file to be indexed by genomic position to efficiently retrieve all reads aligning to a locus.
SAM Tools provide various utilities for manipulating alignments in the SAM format, including sorting, merging, indexing and generating alignments in a per-position format.
SAMtools is hosted by SourceForge.net. The project page is here. The source codes are available from the download page. You can check out the latest source codes with:
Publication
- Li H.*, Handsaker B.*, Wysoker A., Fennell T., Ruan J., Homer N., Marth G., Abecasis G., Durbin R. and 1000 Genome Project Data Processing Subgroup (2009) The Sequence alignment/map (SAM) format and SAMtools. Bioinformatics, 25, 2078-9. [PMID: 19505943]