We are glad to announce that the next workshop “Data Structures in Bioinformatics” (DSB 2026) will take place in Venice, Italy, on *February 18-19*, 2026. dsb-meeting.github.io/DSB2026/ Book the dates! #DSB26

GBZ-base has been a side project for me for a couple of years. It's basically a GBZ graph stored in SQLite instead of a custom file format. You can convert a GBZ graph to GBZ-base quickly and then extract subgraphs around nodes / reference positions on a laptop. 1/n

Last talk of the day (before posters) "Lossless Pangenome Indexing Using Tag Arrays" presented by Parsa Eskandar! #WABI25

There was a workshop on 25 years of the FM-index and the CSA after SEA. I would have liked to attend, but I had other commitments. The invited speakers were Giovanni Manzini and Roberto Grossi, as the other purpose of the workshop was to present them Festschrifts for their 60th birthdays. 1/6

A new preprint on indexing pangenome graphs using an FM-index of the haplotypes and a tag array. Joint work with Parsa Eskandar and @benedictpaten.bsky.social.

We use personalized references with our Giraffe aligner. Each chromosome is partitioned into a sequence of blocks. We sample the most relevant haplotypes in each block using kmer counts. Mapping to this personalized reference improves variant calling accuracy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Coming up soon in vg: faster GAF sorting. The old algorithm was spending too much time parsing and serializing alignments. The new algorithm just deals with blobs and integer keys. With that and some algorithmic improvements, you can now expect to sort 30x short reads in 15-20 minutes on a laptop.