Petagene

PetaGene is a Cambridge, UK-based company that develops software for lossless compression of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. Its core product, PetaSuite, is multi-threaded Linux software that compresses BAM and FASTQ.gz files, reducing storage size and data transfer times by between 60% and 90% (described elsewhere on the company site as up to 6x, and by the CEO as up to ten times smaller) while preserving the original file bit-for-bit with full validation and MD5 matching. A companion free tool, PetaLink, is a user-mode shim that performs random-access on-the-fly decompression in memory, so compressed files appear to tools and pipelines under their original filenames and in their original format without a separate mount or volume; the company states this also improves performance by reducing I/O. A Cloud Edition (CE) extends the approach to migrating pipelines to the cloud and accessing remote data as if local without downloading it first [0][1][2][5].

Adjacent products include PetaSuite Protect, which adds FIPS 140-2 compliant AES-256 region-based encryption for BAM and VCF files, fine-grained access management, compliance demonstration and deep auditing of data usage via a searchable, tamper-evident cryptographic ledger; and PetaSuite FE Plus, which preserves original read data that regular Functional Equivalence pipelines discard, in a footprint stated to be up to 10% smaller than regular FE CRAM. The company also offers cuno / cunoFS, a data-agnostic product providing fast POSIX-compliant access to object storage for applications running on-premises or in the cloud without code changes [0][3][4].

PetaGene originated from research by Cambridge University PhDs, including "Project PetaGene," a collaboration with the Stegle Group at EMBL-EBI, into compressing genomic data without compromising quality. The team went through London's Entrepreneur First incubator, graduating with its sixth cohort in 2016, and the company was incorporated in April 2016 by Dan Greenfield and Vaughan Wittorff; the CEO has stated that PetaGene did not spin out of the university despite the joint EMBL-EBI project [2][5][7].