| ace | Reads the contig sequences from an ACE assembly file. Uses Bio.Sequencing.Ace internally |
| clustal | The alignment format of Clustal X and Clustal W. See also the Bio.Clustalw module. |
| embl | The EMBL flat file format. Uses Bio.GenBank internally. |
| fasta | This refers to the input FASTA file format introduced for Bill Pearson's FASTA tool, where each record starts with a '>' line. Resulting sequences have a generic alphabet by default. |
| fastq | FASTQ files are a bit like FASTA files but also include sequencing qualities. In Biopython, 'fastq' refers to Sanger style FASTQ files which encode PHRED qualities using an ASCII offset of 33. See also the incompatible 'fastq-solexa' and 'fastq-illumina' variants. |
| fastq-solexa | FASTQ files are a bit like FASTA files but also include sequencing qualities. In Biopython, 'fastq' refers to Sanger style FASTQ files which encode PHRED qualities using an ASCII offset of 33. See also the incompatible 'fastq-solexa' and 'fastq-illumina' variants. |
| fastq-illumina | FASTQ files are a bit like FASTA files but also include sequencing qualities. In Biopython, 'fastq' refers to Sanger style FASTQ files which encode PHRED qualities using an ASCII offset of 33. See also the incompatible 'fastq-solexa' and 'fastq-illumina' variants. |
| genbank | The GenBank or GenPept flat file format. |
| ig | This refers to the IntelliGenetics file format, apparently the same as the MASE alignment format. |
| nexus | The NEXUS multiple alignment format, also known as PAUP format. |
| phd | PHD files are output from PHRED, used by PHRAP and CONSED for input. |
| phylip | An alignment format. Truncates names at 10 characters. |
| pir | A 'FASTA like' format introduced by the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF) for the Protein Information Resource (PIR) database, now part of UniProt. |
| stockholm | The Stockholm alignment format is also known as PFAM format. |
| swiss | Swiss-Prot aka UniProt format. |
| tab | Simple two column tab separated sequence files, where each line holds a record's identifier and sequence. For example, this is used by Aligent's eArray software when saving microarray probes in a minimal tab delimited text file. |
| qual | Qual files are a bit like FASTA files but instead of the sequence, record space separated integer sequencing values as PHRED quality scores. A matched pair of FASTA and QUAL files are often used as an alternative to a single FASTQ file. |