FASTA format

In bioinformatics and biochemistry, the FASTA format is a text-based format for representing either nucleotide sequences or amino acid (protein) sequences, in which nucleotides or amino acids are represented using single-letter codes.

The format allows for sequence names and comments to precede the sequences. It originated from the FASTA software package and has since become a near-universal standard in bioinformatics.

The simplicity of FASTA format makes it easy to manipulate and parse sequences using text-processing tools and scripting languages.