What is FastQC?

FastQC is a quality control tool for high-throughput sequence data. It reads sequence data in various formats (FASTQ, BAM, SAM) and provides a modular set of analyses to give a quick impression of whether your data has any problems. These analyses include base quality scores, sequence length distributions, adapter content, and overrepresented sequences. It is commonly used in bioinformatics pipelines to assess the quality of sequencing reads before further analysis steps like alignment or variant calling.