Research in bioinformatics primarily involves collection and analysis of a large 
volume of genomic data. Naturally, it demands efficient storage and transfer of 
this huge amount of data. In recent years, some research has been done to find 
efficient compression algorithms to reduce the size of various sequencing data. 
One way to improve the transmission time of large files is to apply a maximum 
lossless compression on them. In this paper, we present SAMZIP, a specialized 
encoding scheme, for sequence alignment data in SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map) 
format, which improves the compression ratio of existing compression tools 
available. In order to achieve this, we exploit the prior knowledge of the file 
format and specifications. Our experimental results show that our encoding 
scheme improves compression ratio, thereby reducing overall transmission time 
significantly.