Extract text from genomic contact matrices (HIC)
To convert HIC contact matrices to another format, you need Juicebox or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Data" file type, you need software like Juicebox or a similar tool.
The .HIC file is a highly compressed, indexed binary format designed to store Hi-C genomic contact matrices. Developed by the Aiden Lab, this format efficiently archives the massive amounts of 3D chromatin interaction data generated by genome-wide sequencing experiments. Unlike simple text files, a single .HIC file contains contact maps at multiple resolutions (e.g., 2.5Mb down to 1kb bins) and includes pre-calculated normalization vectors (like KR or VC).
Users often struggle with .HIC files because they are proprietary binary containers that cannot be opened in standard text editors or Microsoft Excel. They are strictly designed for high-performance random access by specialized visualization software like Juicebox or the UCSC Genome Browser. To perform downstream analysis in Python or R, researchers frequently need to convert .HIC files into the COOL or .MCOOL formats (based on HDF5) compatible with the 4DN ecosystem, or dump specific chromosomal regions into human-readable TXT, CSV, or .BEDPE interaction lists.
Convert.Guru analyzes your HIC file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted HEIC, GPX, PHO and QZTP files.
If you want to convert HIC file to , you can use Juicebox or similar software from the "Genomic Contact Matrix" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to HIC, try Juicebox or another comparable tool in the "Genomic Contact Matrix" 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 HIC converter.