Extract text from Genomic feature files (GFF)
To convert GFF Feature files to another format, you need Geneious or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Data File" file type, you need software like Geneious or a similar tool.
The .GFF (General Feature Format) is a standard plain-text file used in bioinformatics to describe genes, transcripts, and other sequence features within a genome. It relies on a rigid 9-column, tab-separated structure defined by the Sequence Ontology Project. Bioinformatics tools like Geneious, AUGUSTUS, and Prodigal rely on this format to store gene prediction annotations.
Despite its wide adoption, the .GFF format has significant usability drawbacks. Large datasets frequently exceed 100MB, which instantly crashes basic text editors like Notepad. Because the critical 9th column (Attributes) packs multiple key-value pairs into a single string, directly opening a .GFF in spreadsheet software often results in misaligned or truncated data. Furthermore, version conflicts between GFF2 and GFF3 frequently break parsing scripts and cause pipeline errors.
To analyze the data without writing Python or R scripts, you need to convert it. Convert to CSV or TSV for safe viewing and sorting in Microsoft Excel. For genome browser visualization, convert to BED or GTF. For API and web use, convert to JSON. Note: The .GFF extension is also rarely used for Genie firmware updates, Topcon geospatial geoid models, or GraFit graphs.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GFF file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted GFF3, FNA, FASTA, TXT, PNG, JFIF, FSTA, ANN, BED, GENBANK, GBK, CSV and EMBL files.
If you want to convert GFF file to BED, GFF3, GENBANK, FASTA, GBK, CSV, EMBL, JSON, XML, YAML, YML or TOML, you can use Geneious or similar software from the "Genomic Feature Annotation" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to GFF, try Geneious or another comparable tool in the "Genomic Feature Annotation" 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 GFF converter.