The affordability of DNA sequencing has led to unprecedented volumes of genomic 
data. These data must be stored, processed, and analyzed. The most popular 
format for genomic data is the SAM format, which contains information such as 
alignment, quality values, etc. These files are large (on the order of 
terabytes), which necessitates compression. In this work we propose a new 
reference-based compressor for SAM files, which can accommodate different levels 
of compression, based on the specific needs of the user. In particular, the 
proposed compressor GeneComp allows the user to perform lossy compression of the 
quality scores, which have been proven to occupy more than half of the 
compressed file (when losslessly compressed). We show that the proposed 
compressor GeneComp overall achieves better compression ratios than previously 
proposed algorithms when working on lossless mode.