Differential direct coding: a compression algorithm for nucleotide sequence data.

While modern hardware can provide vast amounts of inexpensive storage for biological databases, the compression of nucleotide sequence data is still of paramount importance in order to facilitate fast search and retrieval operations through a reduction in disk traffic. This issue becomes even more important in light of the recent increase of very large data sets, such as metagenomes. In this article, I propose the Differential Direct Coding algorithm, a general-purpose nucleotide compression protocol that can differentiate between sequence data and auxiliary data by supporting the inclusion of supplementary symbols that are not members of the set of expected nucleotide bases, thereby offering reconciliation between sequence-specific and general-purpose compression strategies. This algorithm permits a sequence to contain a rich lexicon of auxiliary symbols that can represent wildcards, annotation data and special subsequences, such as functional domains or special repeats. In particular, the representation of special subsequences can be incorporated to provide structure-based coding that increases the overall degree of compression. Moreover, supporting a robust set of symbols removes the requirement of wildcard elimination and restoration phases, resulting in a complexity of O(n) for execution time, making this algorithm suitable for very large data sets. Because this algorithm compresses data on the basis of triplets, it is highly amenable to interpretation as a polypeptide at decompression time. Also, an encoded sequence may be further compressed using other existing algorithms, like gzip, thereby maximizing the final degree of compression. Overall, the Differential Direct Coding algorithm can offer a beneficial impact on disk traffic for database queries and other disk-intensive operations.