On compressing and indexing repetitive sequences

We introduce LZ-End, a new member of the Lempel–Ziv family of text compressors, which achieves compression ratios close to those of LZ77 but is much faster at extracting arbitrary text substrings. We then build the first self-index based on LZ77 (or LZ-End) compression, which in addition to text extraction offers fast indexed searches on the compressed text. This self-index is particularly effective for representing highly repetitive sequence collections, which arise for example when storing versioned documents, software repositories, periodic publications, and biological sequence databases.