Heng Li from the Sanger Institute wrote most of the initial source codes
of SAMtools and various converters.

Bob Handsaker from the Broad Institute is a major contributor to the
SAM/BAM specification. He designed and implemented the BGZF format, the
underlying indexable compression format for the BAM format. BGZF does
not support arithmetic between file offsets.

Jue Ruan for the Beijing Genome Institute designed and implemented the
RAZF format, an alternative indexable compression format. RAZF supports
arithmetic between file offsets, at the cost of increased index file
size and the full compatibility with gzip. RAZF is optional and only
used in `faidx' for indexing RAZF compressed fasta files.

Colin Hercus updated novo2sam.pl to support gapped alignment by
novoalign.

Petr Danecek contributed the header parsing library sam_header.c and 
sam2vcf.pl script and added knet support to the RAZF library.