BioLZMA

Developed by the staff at Shenzhen University – Texas Instruments DSPs Laboratory, BioLZMA is a cross-platform, advanced tool designed for DNA sequence compression. One of the main benefits of BioLZMA is the fact that it achieves higher compression rations than more mainstream software such as Bzip2 or Gizp, and even some of the best DNA-specific compression tools.

The application can run on any Windows computer, and does not require installation. Despite its somewhat specialized role, BioLZMA is a very easy to use tool. To get started, users simply have to load the original file (either .fasta, .dna, or .bz) and choose the destination folder.

For more advanced options, users can click the dedicated button from the lower right side of the app’s compact GUI. Once clicked, users are provided with various compression settings, as well as with a comparison table that displays the original and the compressed data sizes.

From the Compression Settings section, users can choose the symbol type for conversion (Amino, DNA, or none), and the length. What’s more, they can also choose the precoding type (either Huffman Coding or Binary coding), as well as the LZMA compression data such as the Dictionary level, the number of fast bytes, the LZMA mode, and the Match Finder type.