http://www.openresearchcomputation.com The most accessed research articles published by Open Research Computation 2012-03-07T00:00:00Z Background: The SAMtools utilities comprise a very useful and widely used suite of software for manipulating files and alignments in the SAM and BAM format, used in a wide range of genetic analyses. The SAMtools utilities are implemented in C and provide an API for programmatic access, to help make this functionality available to programmers wishing to develop in the high level Ruby language we have developed bio-samtools, a Ruby binding to the SAMtools library. Results: The utility of SAMtools is encapsulated in 3 main classes, Bio::DB::Sam, representing the alignment files and providing access to the data in them, Bio::DB::Alignment, representing the individual read alignments inside the files and Bio::DB::Pileup, representing the summarised nucleotides of reads over a single point in the nucleotide sequence to which the reads are aligned. Conclusions: bio-samtools is a flexible and easy to use interface that programmers of many levels of experience can use to access the information in the popular and common SAM/BAM format. http://www.openresearchcomputation.com/content/1/1/1 Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez Raoul Bonnal Mario Caccamo Daniel MacLean Open Research Computation 2012, null:1 2012-03-07T00:00:00Z doi:10.1186/2042-5767-1-1 /content/figures/2042-5767-1-1-toc.gif Open Research Computation 2042-5767 ${item.volume} 1 2012-03-07T00:00:00Z PDF