Hi,

The fastq format right now has: header, sequence string, "phantom" header and quality string. For storage purposes, why doesn't the fastq format incorporate nucleotide information in the quality strings? Is it just to make it more human readable?
<p>FASTQ is almost never stored uncompressed. With compression, merging bases and quality may actually hurt compression as compression is usually less efficient when you mix different types of information together. FASTQ is not meant to be read by a human from the start to end, but it is meant to be eye-read in a small portion and manipulated with the many unix tools. These are critical features.</p>
