The ability to efficiently represent and manipulate genomic annotations and alignments is playing a central role when it comes to analyzing high-throughput sequencing data (a.k.a. NGS data). The GenomicRanges package defines general purpose containers for storing and manipulating genomic intervals and variables defined along a genome. More specialized containers for representing and manipulating short alignments against a reference genome, or a matrix-like summarization of an experiment, are defined in the GenomicAlignments and SummarizedExperiment packages respectively. Both packages build on top of the GenomicRanges infrastructure.
