Question 1

What is a VCF (Variant Call Format) file?

Accepted Answer

The Variant Call Format (VCF) is a text file format used in bioinformatics for storing gene sequence variations. It contains meta-information lines, a header line, and then data lines each containing information about a position in the genome. Note: This viewer is for bioinformatics VCF files, not vCard contact files (which also use .vcf).

Question 2

How do I use this VCF Viewer?

Accepted Answer

Click the "Open Local File" button to select a .vcf file (or .vcf.gz if your browser can handle it for text reading, though direct .gz processing is not built-in). The text content of the VCF file will be displayed.

Question 3

Does this tool analyze or interpret the variants?

Accepted Answer

No, this is a text-based viewer. It displays the raw content of the .vcf file, including header lines and data lines. It does not perform any variant annotation, filtering, or statistical analysis. For such tasks, specialized bioinformatics software is required.

Question 4

Can I view compressed VCF files (e.g., .vcf.gz)?

Accepted Answer

This viewer reads files as plain text. If you upload a .vcf.gz file, it will attempt to read it as text, which will show the compressed binary data, not the uncompressed VCF content. You need to decompress .vcf.gz files first (e.g., using `gunzip`) to view their plain text VCF content with this tool.

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