Provides very fast access to whole genome, population scale variation data from VCF files and sequence data from FASTA-formatted files. It also reads in alignments from FASTA, Phylip, MAF and other file formats. Provides easy-to-use interfaces to genome annotation from UCSC and Bioconductor and gene ontology data from AmiGO and is capable to read, modify and write PLINK .PED-format pedigree files.