Fig. 1

Schematic overview of nanopore raw signal data management with slow5tools. The software permits lossless data conversion from FAST5-to-SLOW5 (f2s command) or SLOW5-to-FAST5 (s2f command). Slow5tools executes a range of common operations for data management, including combining multiple SLOW5/BLOW5 datasets (merge or cat commands) or splitting a dataset into multiple parts (split command). The index command creates an index file for a SLOW5/BLOW5 file, which then enables a specific record(s) to be quickly fetched from the file using the get command. The view command is used to view the contents of a binary BLOW5 file/s in human-readable SLOW5 format and convert datasets between SLOW5 and BLOW5, or between different BLOW5 compression types. Finally, slow5tools can check the integrity of a SLOW5/BLOW5 file (quickcheck) or generate simple summary statistics describing the dataset (stats)