bioSyntax: syntax highlighting for computational biology

BACKGROUND: Computational biology requires the reading and comprehension of biological data files. Plain-text formats such as SAM, VCF, GTF, PDB and FASTA, often contain critical information which is obfuscated by the data structure complexity.

RESULTS: bioSyntax ( https://biosyntax.org/ ) is a freely available suite of biological syntax highlighting packages for vim, gedit, Sublime, VSCode, and less. bioSyntax improves the legibility of low-level biological data in the bioinformatics workspace.

CONCLUSION: bioSyntax supports computational scientists in parsing and comprehending their data efficiently and thus can accelerate research output.