Research article

bioSyntax: syntax highlighting for computational biology

Babaian, A., Ebou, A., Fegen, A., Kam, H. Y., Novakovsky, G. E., Wong, J., Aïssi D., & Yao, L.

Venue
BMC Bioinformatics
Published
August 14, 2018
Issue/Page
19(1): 303
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Last updated May 11, 2025

Abstract

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.

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Babaian A, et al. bioSyntax: syntax highlighting for computational biology. bioSyntax: syntax highlighting for computational biology. 2018; 19:303. doi: 10.1186/s12859-018-2315-y

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© Li Yao 2019-2026.