Bioinformatics file types

In the world of bioinformatics there are a huge number of file types. This guide aims to help you to understand what these filetypes are and when they are commonly used.

Here we provide a short primer so that you can understand the file types you will commonly encounter using iMaps, but also in bioinformatics at large.

fastq

sam/bam

bed

bedgraph

bigWig

gtf

"genome index"

csv/tsv