What it does

KmerGenie estimates the best k-mer length for 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.

Citation

Chikhi R., Medvedev P. Informed and Automated k-Mer Size Selection for Genome Assembly, HiTSeq 2013.