Extract text from FASTA amino acid files (FAA)
To convert FAA Sequence files to another format, you need NCBI BLAST or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Sequence File" file type, you need software like NCBI BLAST or a similar tool.
A .faa file is a standard plain-text format used in bioinformatics to store protein amino acid sequences. It is based on the FASTA format, created by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson. Inside the file, each sequence begins with a single-line description starting with a greater-than symbol (>), followed by lines of sequence data represented by single-letter amino acid codes.
These files are the universal standard for tools developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), most notably BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), and gene prediction software like GeneMarkS.
While universally compatible, the .faa format has severe practical disadvantages for modern data analysis. It is a strict flat-text structure designed for command-line parsing, lacking tabular formatting, relational metadata, or spreadsheet compatibility. Opening a massive 500MB or 2GB .faa file containing millions of proteins in a standard text editor will immediately crash most operating systems due to RAM exhaustion. Biologists and data scientists often struggle to merge .faa sequence data with clinical metadata or statistical analyses natively.
To make this data usable outside of specialized bioinformatics pipelines, conversion is required. For spreadsheet analysis and statistical software, convert to CSV or TSV. For modern web applications or API integrations, convert to JSON. If you simply need to extract the raw text quickly without crashing your computer, convert to TXT.
Convert.Guru analyzes your FAA file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted FNA, FASTA, JSONL, TXT, ZIP, ASN, SRB and CAA files.
If you want to convert FAA file to FASTA or CAA, you can use NCBI BLAST or similar software from the "Protein Amino Acid Sequence" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to FAA, try NCBI BLAST or another comparable tool in the "Protein Amino Acid Sequence" category.
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 FAA converter.