fig2

Figure 2. Potential FASTA successor formats FASTV and FASTM. For FASTV, each genome position is depicted either by a matrix “()” (FASTV A) or a human readable notation (FASTV B), where a single genome location comprises the normalised distribution value of one of the four bases or a gap, ignoring bases that do not occur at this position. In FASTV, the frequency of nucleotides per position is captured but not their respective occurrences across subpopulations. For FASTM, a two-dimensional matrix enables capturing not only the relative distribution of nucleotide variations for every genome position, but the matrix further enables the tracking of individual subpopulations.