TwoBit Sequence Archives

A twoBit file is a highly efficient way to store genomic sequence. The format is defined here. Note that lower-case nucleotides are considered masked in twoBit, which can cause such sequence to be ignored when using the -mask option with gfServer; therefore, you may wish to convert lower-case sequence to upper-case when preparing the FASTA format.

To complete the steps below you must first download the faToTwoBit, twoBitInfo, and twoBitToFa utilities. For more information on downloading our command-line utilities, see these instructions.

To create a twoBit file, follow these steps:

Prepare the sequence for your twoBit file in a FASTA-formatted file (i.e. genome.fa).
Run the faToTwoBit program on your FASTA file:
```
    faToTwoBit genome.fa genome.2bit
```
Use twoBitInfo to verify the sequences in this assembly and create a chrom.sizes file, which is useful to construct the big* files in later processing steps:
```
    twoBitInfo genome.2bit stdout | sort -k2rn > genome.chrom.sizes
```

The twoBit commands can function with the .2bit file as a URL:

    twoBitInfo -udcDir=. http://your-website.edu/~user/genome.2bit | sort -k2nr > genome.chrom.sizes

Sequence can be extracted from the .2bit file with the twoBitToFa command, for example:

    twoBitToFa -seq=chr1 -udcDir=. http://your-website.edu/~user/genome.2bit stdout > genome.chr1.fa