Fig. 1.

Finding a minimum representative 32-base pair k-mer. a From a selected 64 base pair segment, the series of 64 possible 32-base pair k-mers is defined by sequentially shifting the 32-base window by one base. The first four and last of the possible k-mers are shown schematically. b An example k-mer sequence. c Two-bit encoding of the k-mer sequence shown in b. d The 64-bit decimal value of the k-mer sequence shown in b. The k-mer strand with the lower 64-bit decimal value is used to generate a hash, and the minimal valued hash identifies the representative k-mer for this 64 base segment