The BigBed file format is the binary, randomly accessible of the popular BED file format. The BED-like files are tab-delimited files that store genomic data in the following manner:

chrom   start   stop
chr1    100     1000
chr1    3000    3200
chr2    200     230

For more information on these file formats, consult the UCSC Genome Browser's page on the subject.

For more information on the BigBed format, please refer to the 2010 paper from Kent et al., BigWig and BigBed: enabling browsing of large distributed datasets (doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq351).

This repository contains code for both a Rust crate for dealing with BigBed files and a cross-platform version of bigBedToBed-the utility provided by Kent et al. that converts BigBed files to BED files.

This project relies on functions in the Rust std crate version 1.32 or higher. (You can check your version of rustc / cargo with cargo --version.) If you have not updated to at least version 1.32, run rustup like so:

rustup update

If you did not install Rust through rustup (i.e. you installed Rust via a package manager), I recommend removing your current installation and installing via rustup. If you don't have rustup, you can consult the Rust website.

Windows users may experience an error along the lines of

error: linker link.exe not found

If that is the case, make sure that you have all the correct build tools installed. (Consult this issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/43039 for more instructions.)

This crate features two main components:

• a library for manipulating BigBed files
• an example binary (rbb) that replicates the functionality of UCSC's bigBedToBed

To build the bigbed library with full optimizations, run the following command:

cargo build --release

All library files will be located in target/release.

To build the example binary (with full optimizations), run the following command:

cargo build --features binary --release --bin rbb

The rbb binary will be available in target/release/rbb. (Note: Windows users may find the executable named rbb.exe instead of just rbb.)

This crate includes built-in testcases to ensure that all functions are running properly. To run these testcases, execute the following command:

cargo test

This repository includes several corresponding BED and bigbed files. For instance, the files test/beds/long.bed and test/bigbeds/long.bb contain the same data, but in BED and BigBed formats, respectively.

To run a manual test, execute the following commands:

# build the binary and run on long.bed
cargo run --features=binary test/bigbeds/long.bb test-long.bed

# compare test output to expected output
# this should produce no output if the program works
diff -q test-long.bed test/beds/long.bed

You can repeat this process with other provided files in test/ or with files of your own.

This crate is licensed under GPL-3.0. Please see the LICENSE for details.