Open Access
Open access
volume 10 issue 2

Twelve years of SAMtools and BCFtools

Petr Danecek 1
James K Bonfield 1
Jennifer Liddle 1
John Marshall 2
Valeriu Ohan 1
Martin O Pollard 1
Andrew Whitwham 1
Thomas Keane 3
Susan A. MaCarthy 1
Robert M Davies 1
Heng Li 4, 5
Publication typeJournal Article
Publication date2021-01-29
scimago Q1
wos Q1
SJR5.314
CiteScore20.0
Impact factor3.9
ISSN2047217X
Computer Science Applications
Health Informatics
Abstract
Background

SAMtools and BCFtools are widely used programs for processing and analysing high-throughput sequencing data. They include tools for file format conversion and manipulation, sorting, querying, statistics, variant calling, and effect analysis amongst other methods.

Findings

The first version appeared online 12 years ago and has been maintained and further developed ever since, with many new features and improvements added over the years. The SAMtools and BCFtools packages represent a unique collection of tools that have been used in numerous other software projects and countless genomic pipelines.

Conclusion

Both SAMtools and BCFtools are freely available on GitHub under the permissive MIT licence, free for both non-commercial and commercial use. Both packages have been installed >1 million times via Bioconda. The source code and documentation are available from https://www.htslib.org.

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GOST |
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GOST Copy
Danecek P. et al. Twelve years of SAMtools and BCFtools // GigaScience. 2021. Vol. 10. No. 2.
GOST all authors (up to 50) Copy
Danecek P., Bonfield J. K., Liddle J., Marshall J., Ohan V., Pollard M. O., Whitwham A., Keane T., MaCarthy S. A., Davies R. M., Li H. Twelve years of SAMtools and BCFtools // GigaScience. 2021. Vol. 10. No. 2.
RIS |
Cite this
RIS Copy
TY - JOUR
DO - 10.1093/gigascience/giab008
UR - https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giab008/6137722
TI - Twelve years of SAMtools and BCFtools
T2 - GigaScience
AU - Danecek, Petr
AU - Bonfield, James K
AU - Liddle, Jennifer
AU - Marshall, John
AU - Ohan, Valeriu
AU - Pollard, Martin O
AU - Whitwham, Andrew
AU - Keane, Thomas
AU - MaCarthy, Susan A.
AU - Davies, Robert M
AU - Li, Heng
PY - 2021
DA - 2021/01/29
PB - Oxford University Press
IS - 2
VL - 10
PMID - 33590861
SN - 2047-217X
ER -
BibTex
Cite this
BibTex (up to 50 authors) Copy
@article{2021_Danecek,
author = {Petr Danecek and James K Bonfield and Jennifer Liddle and John Marshall and Valeriu Ohan and Martin O Pollard and Andrew Whitwham and Thomas Keane and Susan A. MaCarthy and Robert M Davies and Heng Li},
title = {Twelve years of SAMtools and BCFtools},
journal = {GigaScience},
year = {2021},
volume = {10},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
month = {jan},
url = {https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giab008/6137722},
number = {2},
doi = {10.1093/gigascience/giab008}
}
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