Comment by bede
Yes, when doing anything intensive with lots of sequences it generally makes sense to liberate them from FASTA as early as possible and index them somehow. But as an interchange format FASTA seems quite sticky. I find the pervasiveness of fastq.gz particularly unfortunate with Gzip being as slow as it is.
> Took me a while to realize that Grace Blackwell refers to a person and not an Nvidia chip :)
I even confused myself about this while writing :-)
Note that BGZF solves gzip’s speed problem (libdeflate + parallel compression/decompression) without breaking compatibility, and usually the hit to compression ratio is tolerable.