Boiler

Boiler is a novel software tool that efficiently compresses and queries large RNA-seq alignment datasets. By discarding most of the per-read data and retaining only essential information, such as genomic coverage vectors and a few empirical distributions, Boiler achieves a significantly smaller storage footprint compared to other compression tools. Despite the high compression level, Boiler can recover the most relevant per-read data, resulting in only a minimal impact on the results of downstream analysis tools for isoform assembly and quantification. Additionally, Boiler enables users to perform rapid and helpful queries on the compressed files without the need for complete decompression.