A fast and simple approach tok-mer decomposition

Abstract Alignment 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. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Copyright The 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.