VCFformat
VCF format, short for Variant Call Format, is a text-based standard used to store genetic variation data and related metadata produced by sequencing experiments and variant calling pipelines. It is widely adopted in genomics for representing single nucleotide variants, small insertions and deletions, and, with limitations, larger structural variants. A VCF file typically exists as a header followed by rows of variant records, enabling easy parsing, filtering, and integration with annotation tools.
The file structure consists of a header section and a data section. Header lines begin with two
VCF has several versions, with 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 being common. It is often compressed using bgzip