Evaluation of compression methods for genomic sequence

Along with the development of sequencing technology, the volume of genome datasets have increased greatly at a fast rate. The excessive surging of genome data causes storage issues to public or private databases as well to upload or transmit genome data via Internet. Data compression is an effective method to solve these problems. However, various genome compression methods adopting different strategies have been presented during the previous years, make it challenging to choose the optimal method for practical use. In this paper, we first review state of the art on genome compression, then evaluate three excellent algorithms (GReEn, GDC and DELIMINATE) on real data and compare their performance with popular general-purpose compression algorithms, i.e., gizp, bzip2, xz and their parallel versions. Instead of declaring the best method, we give advices to choose appropriate methods for specific genome dataset.