Flexible and efficient handling of nanopore sequencing signal data with slow5tools

Nanopore sequencing is being rapidly adopted in genomics. We recently developed SLOW5, a new file format with advantages for storage and analysis of raw signal data from nanopore experiments. Here we introduce slow5tools , an intuitive toolkit for handling nanopore data in SLOW5 format. Slow5tools enables lossless data conversion and a range of tools for interacting with SLOW5 files. Slow5tools uses multi-threading, multi-processing, and other engineering strategies to achieve fast data conversion and manipulation, including live FAST5-to-SLOW5 conversion during sequencing. We provide examples and benchmarking experiments to illustrate slow5tools usage, and describe the engineering principles underpinning its performance.