Extract text from FA files
To convert your FA file to another format, you need NCBI BLAST or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Sequence Format" file type, you need software like NCBI BLAST or a similar tool.
A .FA file (short for FASTA) is the industry-standard text-based format for representing nucleotide sequences (DNA/RNA) or peptide sequences (proteins). While universal in bioinformatics, the format's simplicity is also its primary limitation: it contains only the raw sequence data and a single header line, lacking the quality scores found in FASTQ files or the rich feature annotations present in GenBank (GB) files. Researchers often struggle with .FA files because they can become unwieldy (reaching gigabytes in size for whole-genome sequencing), making them impossible to open in standard text editors like Microsoft Word or Notepad without crashing the system. Additionally, visual inspection of raw ATCG strings is difficult for humans.
For downstream analysis that requires sequencing quality metrics, users often convert .FA to FASTQ (generating dummy quality scores). For publication and collaborative review, converting to PDF or formatted RTF ensures the sequence wrapping remains readable. For data manipulation outside of CLI tools, researchers frequently convert these sequences into CSV or Excel formats to align headers with sequence data in a tabular view.
Convert.Guru analyzes your FA file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted FASTA, FQ, GZ, FNA, ACCDB, JPEG, PDF, ZIP, SAV, MPFA and PDA files.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our FA converter.