title: Compression of nucleic acid and protein sequence data.
abstract: This paper describes the application of text compression methods to machine-readable files of nucleic acid and protein sequence data. Two main methods are used to reduce the storage requirements of such files, these being n-gram coding and run-length coding. A Pascal program combining both of these techniques resulted in a compression figure of 74.6% for the GenBank data-base and a program that used only n-gram coding gave a compression figure of 42.8% for the Protein Identification Resource database.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, UK.
authors.forename: J R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Willett
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001483:Base Sequence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D007256:Information Systems; D012984:Software