BigWig and BigBed: enabling browsing of large distributed datasets.
CONCLUSIONS
BigWig and BigBed files are compressed binary indexed files containing data at several resolutions that allow the high-performance display of next-generation sequencing experiment results in the UCSC Genome Browser. The visualization is implemented using a multi-layered software approach that takes advantage of specific capabilities of web-based protocols and Linux and UNIX operating systems files, R trees and various indexing and compression tricks. As a result, only the data needed to support the current browser view is transmitted rather than the entire file, enabling fast remote access to large distributed data sets.


METHODS
Binaries for the BigWig and BigBed creation and parsing utilities may be downloaded at http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/linux.x86_64/. Source code for the creation and visualization software is freely available for non-commercial use at http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/jksrc.zip, implemented in C and supported on Linux. The UCSC Genome Browser is available at http://genome.ucsc.edu.
Kent
W J
WJ
Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
Zweig
A S
AS
Barber
G
G
Hinrichs
A S
AS
Karolchik
D
D
D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D044962:Data Compression; D057225:Data Mining; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D012984:Software