Introduction

Introduction#

vcztools provides bcftools-compatible querying and format conversion for VCF Zarr (VCZ). Please see the GigaScience paper and the specification repo for more information about the VCF Zarr format. To create VCZ files from VCF and other formats, see the bio2zarr project.

Vcztools provides a Python API to efficiently read VCZ data from local files and remote object stores using bcftools-compatible region and variant filtering syntax. It aims to provide a drop-in replacement for a subset of bcftools functionality. Currently supported are the view, query and index -s/-n commands; see bcftools emulation for worked examples. We aim for 100% compatibility — if you notice a difference between the output of vcztools and bcftools please open an issue.

In addition to the bcftools-shaped commands, vcztools provides format exporters for common downstream tools:

Development status#

vcztools is under active development and contributions are warmly welcomed at the GitHub repository.