CRAM

CRAM is a more highly compressed alternative to the BAM and SAM DNA sequence alignment file formats.

CRAM is a format designed by the European Bioinformatics Institute. It uses reference based compression, meaning that only base calls that differ to a designated reference sequence need to be stored. 

See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/software/cram-toolkit for the EBI’s documentation. Typically CRAM achieves 40-50% space saving over the alternative BAM format. The CRAM specification can be found at the http://samtools.github.io/hts-specs/ page along with related formats.

Downloads

Packages supporting the CRAM format include Samtools/Htslib, Scramble, Cramtools and Picard/Htsjdk. Please download one of those to get support for the file format.

Contact

If you need help or have any queries, please contact us using the details below.

A generic email list is shared for all associated alignment formats at [email protected] or use the tool specific github pages for submitting issues.


Sanger Institute Contributors

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James Bonfield

Principal Software Developer

External Contributor

 
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