Since our proof-of-principle publication of reference-based sequence read data compression in 2011 (http://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/5/734), the EBI has been moving towards a production release of CRAM, a framework technology comprising file format and toolkit in which we combine highly efficient and tunable compression with a data format that is directly available for computational use (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/about/cram_toolkit). Details of our plans are provided here.

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