SRA tools is a toolkit for using data in the INSDC Sequence Read
Archives.  SRAs operated by the International Nucleotide Sequence
Database Collaboration house sequence reads and alignments generated
by "next-gen" sequencers.  SRA tools allows conversion of .sra
files, which INSDC SRAs maintain, from/to other formats that the
'next-gen' sequencers generate including:

* csfasta/csqual (ABI SOLiD)
* fastq (and fasta for writing)
* hdf5 (PacBio, reading only)
* qseq (older Illumina)
* sam (writing only) / bam (reading only)
* sff

The toolkit uses the NCBI-VDB back-end enabling seamless access to
remote SRA data and local SRA files.