title: MFCompress: a compression tool for FASTA and multi-FASTA data.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The data deluge phenomenon is becoming a serious problem in most genomic centers. To alleviate it, general purpose tools, such as gzip, are used to compress the data. However, although pervasive and easy to use, these tools fall short when the intention is to reduce as much as possible the data, for example, for medium- and long-term storage. A number of algorithms have been proposed for the compression of genomics data, but unfortunately only a few of them have been made available as usable and reliable compression tools.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this article, we describe one such tool, MFCompress, specially designed for the compression of FASTA and multi-FASTA files. In comparison to gzip and applied to multi-FASTA files, MFCompress can provide additional average compression gains of almost 50%, i.e. it potentially doubles the available storage, although at the cost of some more computation time. On highly redundant datasets, and in comparison with gzip, 8-fold size reductions have been obtained.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Both source code and binaries for several operating systems are freely available for non-commercial use at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/software/mfcompress/.
authors.affiliation: IEETA, Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: Armando J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Pinho
authors.forename: Diogo
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pratas
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D044962:Data Compression; D016678:Genome; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D012984:Software