genozip: a fast and efficient compression tool for VCF files

Abstract

genozip is a new lossless compression tool for VCF (Variant Call Format) files. By applying field-specific algorithms and fully utilizing the available computational hardware, genozip achieves the highest compression ratios amongst existing lossless compression tools known to the authors, at speeds comparable with the fastest multi-threaded compressors. genozip is freely available to non-commercial users. It can be installed via conda-forge, Docker Hub, or downloaded from github.com/divonlan/genozip. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.