Sam Format

SAM and BAM format

SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map) plaintext format and the associated binary BAM format are used to represent alignments of next-generation sequencing reads to reference genomes.

The format is documented at the SamTools website: http://samtools.sourceforge.net/

The plaintext SAM format incorporates elements of other bioinformatics file formats, including Cigar format and FASTQ format.

-- Ian Holmes - 20 Mar 2011