KmerGenie

KmerGenie estimates the best k-mer length for genome de novo assembly. Given a set of reads, KmerGenie first computes the k-mer abundance histogram for many values of k. Then, for each value of k, it predicts the number of distinct genomic k-mers in the dataset, and returns the k-mer length which maximizes this number. Experiments show that KmerGenie’s choices lead to assemblies that are close to the best possible over all k-mer lengths.

Reference

R. Chikhi, P. Medvedev, Informed and automated k-mer size selection for genome assembly, Bioinformatics (2014) 30 (1): 31-37.

Abstract. Genome assembly tools based on the de Bruijn graph framework rely on a parameter k, which represents a trade-off between several competing effects that are difficult to quantify. There is currently a lack of tools that would automatically estimate the best k to use and/or quickly generate histograms of k-mer abundances that would allow the user to make an informed decision. We develop a fast and accurate sampling method that constructs approximate abundance histograms with several orders of magnitude performance improvement over traditional methods. We then present a fast heuristic that uses the generated abundance histograms for putative k values to estimate the best possible value of k. We test the effectiveness of our tool using diverse sequencing datasets and find that its choice of k leads to some of the best assemblies.

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