FASTA's one-line header made plain-text sequences the bioinformatics standard

In the mid-1980s sequence data was piling up in formats tied to individual programs and databases, making it hard to move a sequence from one tool to another. William Pearson and David Lipman's FASTA search programs shipped with a format so simple it could not be mistaken: one line beginning with '>' carries the sequence's name and description, and the lines after it are the sequence itself in single-letter codes.

The format's rules stayed minimal. NCBI, which runs GenBank, defines the defline as a '>' followed by a unique SeqID and optional source modifiers, while the sequence itself can span lines and uses only IUPAC letters. Because the whole file is plain text, parsing it needs nothing more than a line reader — the format's documentation notes that its simplicity makes sequences easy to manipulate with text-processing tools.

That near-zero cost of adoption did the work. FASTA became a near-universal standard in bioinformatics, accepted for database search and submission across the major sequence archives, and later formats such as FASTQ built directly on its conventions rather than replacing them.

A '>' header plus plain letters made sequences shareable

Plain ASCII means any text tool can read and write it

One '>' header line carries the identifier every database needs

It shipped with working FASTA search software, so adoption needed no separate campaign

NCBI and other public archives accept it as submission input

A format wins when the cost of using it is near zero: if a tool as trivial as a line reader can parse it, adoption spreads without anyone having to convince the world.

FASTA remains the default for database search and submission, and its conventions were extended into FASTQ for sequencing reads. It also seeded a family of FASTA alignment programs still used for similarity search.