Pysam is a python module for reading and manipulating files in the SAM/BAM format. The SAM/BAM format is a way to store efficiently large numbers of alignments (Li 2009), such as those routinely created by next-generation sequencing methods.

Pysam is a lightweight wrapper of the samtools C-API. Pysam also includes an interface for tabix.

If you are using the conda packaging manager (e.g. miniconda or anaconda), you can install pysam from the bioconda channel:

conda config --add channels defaults
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --add channels bioconda
conda install pysam

Installation through bioconda is the recommended way to install pysam as it resolves non-python dependencies and uses pre-configured compilation options. Especially for OS X this will potentially save a lot of trouble.

The current version of pysam wraps 3rd-party code from htslib-1.9, samtools-1.9, and bcftools-1.9.

Pysam is available through pypi. To install, type:

pip install pysam

Pysam documentation is available here

Questions and comments are very welcome and should be sent to the pysam user group