FASTQ format

FASTQ format
Internet media type	text/plain
Developed by	Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Initial release	~2000
Type of format	Bioinformatics
Extended from	ASCII and FASTA format
Website	maq.sourceforge.net/fastq.shtml

FASTQ format is a text-based format for storing both a biological sequence (usually nucleotide sequence) and its corresponding quality scores. Both the sequence letter and quality score are each encoded with a single ASCII character for brevity.

It was originally developed at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to bundle a FASTA formatted sequence and its quality data, but has become the de facto standard for storing the output of high-throughput sequencing instruments such as the Illumina Genome Analyzer.^[1]

^ Cock, P. J. A.; Fields, C. J.; Goto, N.; Heuer, M. L.; Rice, P. M. (2009). "The Sanger FASTQ file format for sequences with quality scores, and the Solexa/Illumina FASTQ variants". Nucleic Acids Research. 38 (6): 1767–1771. doi:10.1093/nar/gkp1137. PMC 2847217. PMID 20015970.

[Cock2009-1] Cock, P. J. A.; Fields, C. J.; Goto, N.; Heuer, M. L.; Rice, P. M. (2009). "The Sanger FASTQ file format for sequences with quality scores, and the Solexa/Illumina FASTQ variants". Nucleic Acids Research. 38 (6): 1767–1771. doi:10.1093/nar/gkp1137. PMC 2847217. PMID 20015970.

[1]