VirusVAR: A tool to lightweight and customize virus genome sequences, with SARS-CoV-2 as an example

With the widespread prevalence of pandemics such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2, there has been an explosive accumulation of viral variants, posing a huge challenge to monitoring virus mutation and other data processing. The present study aimed to develop a tool, named VirusVAR, to lightweight and customize virus genome sequences. The present study took SARS-CoV-2 genomes as an example to construct VirusVAR based on the variations (VAR) of the full-length genomes downloaded from public databases. All genome sequences were subjected to quality control, single nucleotide variants (SNVs) annotation, format conversion, and final compression before appending to BZ2 files, lightweight more than 12 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences with a size of more than 500 Giga Bytes (GB) into a set of storage files with a size of 941 Million Bytes (MB), with a compression ratio of 1: 594. VirusVAR is a tool to lightweight and customize virus genome sequences, capable of timely updating, quickly querying, and customizable outputting of virus sequences.