USEARCH manual > file formats > FASTA files
FASTA files
 
The FASTA sequence file format is widely supported by bioinformatics tools. For a detailed description, see this Wikipedia entry about FASTA.

USEARCH allows lines of any length in a FASTA file. (Some programs limit lines to e.g. 80 characters).

USEARCH does not support comments in FASTA files.

White space characters (blanks and tabs) are discarded if found in sequence data, but many other tools do not allow this and the practice is not recommended.

USEARCH will truncate sequence labels at the first white space unless the -notrunclabels option is given.