SRA tools is a toolkit for using data in the INSDC Sequence Read Archives.

SRAs operated by International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration
houses sequence reads and alignments generated by "next-gen" sequencers.
SRA tools allows conversion of .sra files, which INSDC SRAs maintain,
from/to other formats that the 'next-gen' sequenecers generate including:

* csfasta/csqual (ABI SOLiD)
* fastq (and fasta for writing)
* hdf5 (PacBio, reading only)
* qseq (older Illumina)
* sam (writing only) / bam (reading only)
* sff

The toolkit uses NCBI-VDB back-end enabling seamless access to remote SRA data
and local SRA files.
