Phastcons .Data To Binary Wig File

Question

[Hamilton]

I have chr.data phastcons scores for mm9 from UCSC genome browser. Btw i need corresponding binary wiggle files for them. chr.data has already fixed step wiggle format when i open up the file. But since extension is .data document format, tools which run with a wiggle file do not recognize it as a binary wiggle file at all. How can i convert .data document format to binary ascii .wig file?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

[Tao Liu]

What's a "binary" but "ascii" format? FixedStep wig is a wiggle file already. If you want to make a binary bigWig file, you'd use wigToBigWig tool from UCSC.

Answer 1

[Jorge Amigo]

you'll have to be completely sure that your .data file is in a proper wiggle format. check out UCSC's file format reference site here and arrange your file in order to match exactly the convention described. once it's a proper .wig file (maybe even changing manually the .data extension for a .wig one) you may use it with those "tools which run with a wiggle file". in case you need not a plain text file but a binary one you may use UCSC's wigToBigWig (you can download it from here) as suggested by Tao.