Fig. 1.

Structure of the K-mer File Format with k = 10 and minimizers of size 8. Top right part: a toy k-mer set shown in plain text. Left part: The same k-mer set is represented in KFF. The top-left box is the file header and each following boxes are different sections. Bottom right part: alternatively, a Sequences section can be represented more succinctly by a Minimizer section which contains the same set of k-mers. For example, the first entry in the M section has sequence ACTG with its minimizer at position 3, hence it corresponds to sequence ACTAAACTGATG of size 12 (which is identical to the first entry in the R section), from which three k-mers can be extracted