FASTQ File

Category: Text Files

What is a FASTQ file?

Fast q files are text files that contain sequence data from all the clusters that pass filter on a flow cell—with quality Phred score, represented as characters. The files were developed initially at the Wellcome trust sanger institute to bundle a FASTA formatted sequence and its quality data. Fastq file isn’t standardized. The files contain numerous variants, and it can be challenging to differentiate them automatically with high reliability. FastQ files may contain up to millions of entries. They are huge probably several megabytes or gigabytes in size, and opening in a regular text editor can prove hectic. To view the file for troubleshooting purposes or out of curiosity, you need a text editor to handle huge files, for instance, Linux or Unix. Here large files can be viewed via command line. FastQ recently became the de facto standard for storing the output of high through output sequencing instrument, like an illumine genome analyzer.

How to Make FASTQ Files

Below are some software programs that can open FASTQ files. Download one to open your file now.