K-mer counting is a computational mechanism in bioinformatics that partitions nucleotide sequences into contiguous substrings of fixed length $k$ to estimate sequence frequency distributions and genome coverage depth. The theory relies on mapping these k-mers into hash tables or probabilistic data structures like Bloom filters, where the abundance of unique versus repetitive k-mers correlates with genomic features such as heterozygosity, repeat content, and contamination levels. Within the domain of next-generation sequencing analysis, this concept serves as a fundamental principle for genome size estimation without assembly, haplotype resolution in diploid organisms, and alignment-free phylogenetics.
K-mer counting is a computational mechanism in bioinformatics that partitions nucleotide sequences into contiguous substrings of fixed length $k$ to estimate sequence frequency distributions and geno…