Here, we define a sequence file format that allows for multi‐character elements (FASTC). The format is derived from the FASTA format and the custom alphabet format of POY4/5. The format is more general than either of these formats and can represent a broad variety of sequence‐type data. This format should be useful for analyses involving datasets encoded as linear streams such as gene synteny, comparative linguistics, temporal gene expression and development, complex animal behaviours, and general biological time‐series data.

中文翻译：

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FASTC：多字符序列数据的文件格式

在这里，我们定义了一种允许多字符元素 (FASTC) 的序列文件格式。格式源自FASTA格式和POY4/5的自定义字母格式。该格式比这两种格式都更通用，可以表示范围广泛的序列类型数据。这种格式对于涉及编码为线性流的数据集的分析很有用，例如基因同线性、比较语言学、时间基因表达和发育、复杂的动物行为和一般生物时间序列数据。