slow5tools

Slow5tools is a simple toolkit for converting (FAST5 <-> SLOW5), compressing, viewing, indexing and manipulating data in SLOW5 format. About SLOW5 format: SLOW5 is a new file format for storing signal data from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) devices. SLOW5 was developed to overcome inherent limitations in the standard FAST5 signal data format that prevent efficient, scalable analysis and cause many headaches for developers. SLOW5 can be encoded in human-readable ASCII format, or a more compact and efficient binary format (BLOW5) - this is analogous to the seminal SAM/BAM format for storing DNA sequence alignments. The BLOW5 binary format supports zlib (DEFLATE) compression, or other compression methods, thereby minimising the data storage footprint while still permitting efficient parallel access. Detailed benchmarking experiments have shown that SLOW5 format is an order of magnitude faster and significantly smaller than FAST5.