title: fqtools: an efficient software suite for modern FASTQ file manipulation.
abstract: Many Next Generation Sequencing analyses involve the basic manipulation of input sequence data before downstream processing (e.g. searching for specific sequences, format conversion or basic file statistics). The rapidly increasing data volumes involved in NGS make any dataset manipulation a time-consuming and error-prone process. I have developed fqtools; a fast and reliable FASTQ file manipulation suite that can process the full set of valid FASTQ files, including those with multi-line sequences, whilst identifying invalid files. Fqtools is faster than similar tools, and is designed for use in automatic processing pipelines.
  
  
  
  fqtools is open source and is available at: https://github.com/alastair-droop/fqtools
  
  
  
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
  
  
  
  a.p.droop@leeds.ac.uk.
authors.affiliation: MRC Medical Bioinformatics Centre, University of Leeds, Clarendon Way, Leeds, LS2 9NL, UK.
authors.forename: Alastair P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Droop
mesh_terms: D001699:Biometry; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D012984:Software