Disk-based k-mer counting on a PC.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The k-mer counting problem, which is to build the histogram of occurrences of every k-symbol long substring in a given text, is important for many bioinformatics applications. They include developing de Bruijn graph genome assemblers, fast multiple sequence alignment and repeat detection.

Results

We propose a simple, yet efficient, parallel disk-based algorithm for counting k-mers. Experiments show that it usually offers the fastest solution to the considered problem, while demanding a relatively small amount of memory. In particular, it is capable of counting the statistics for short-read human genome data, in input gzipped FASTQ file, in less than 40 minutes on a PC with 16 GB of RAM and 6 CPU cores, and for long-read human genome data in less than 70 minutes. O

SUBMITTER: Deorowicz S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3680041 | biostudies-literature | 2013 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature