{"paper_id":"384ff42f-57c9-4082-bc42-893f5263fc0f","body_text":"Abstract\nAlignment searches are fast heuristic methods to identify similar regions between two sequences. This group of algorithms is ubiquitously used in a myriad of software to find homologous sequences or to map sequence reads to genomes. Often the first step in alignment searches is k-mer decomposition: listing all overlapping subsequences of length k. This article presents a simple integer representation of k-mers and shows how a sequence can be quickly decomposed into k-mers in constant time with respect to k.\nCompeting Interest Statement\nThe authors have declared no competing interest.\nCopyright\nThe copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.","source_license":"CC-BY-4.0","license_restricted":false}