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. 2010 Sep 1;26(17):2204-7.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq351. Epub 2010 Jul 17.

BigWig and BigBed: enabling browsing of large distributed datasets

W J Kent  1 , A S Zweig, G Barber, A S Hinrichs, D Karolchik
Affiliations

BigWig and BigBed: enabling browsing of large distributed datasets

W J Kent et al. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Summary: BigWig and BigBed files are compressed binary indexed files containing data at several resolutions that allow the high-performance display of next-generation sequencing experiment results in the UCSC Genome Browser. The visualization is implemented using a multi-layered software approach that takes advantage of specific capabilities of web-based protocols and Linux and UNIX operating systems files, R trees and various indexing and compression tricks. As a result, only the data needed to support the current browser view is transmitted rather than the entire file, enabling fast remote access to large distributed data sets.

Availability and implementation: Binaries for the BigWig and BigBed creation and parsing utilities may be downloaded at http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/linux.x86_64/. Source code for the creation and visualization software is freely available for non-commercial use at http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/jksrc.zip, implemented in C and supported on Linux. The UCSC Genome Browser is available at http://genome.ucsc.edu.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Genome Browser image of BigWig annotation tracks. The top track is displayed as a bar graph, the bottom track as a point graph. Shading is used to distinguish the mean (dark), one standard deviation above the mean (medium) and the maximum (light). Peaks with clipped tops are colored magenta.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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