Crossing the streams: a framework for streaming analysis of short DNA sequencing reads

We present a semi-streaming algorithm for k-mer spectral analysis of DNA sequencing reads, together with a derivative approach that is fully streaming. The approach can also be applied to genomic, transcriptomic, and metagenomic data sets. We develop two tools for short-read analysis based on these approaches, a method for semi-streaming k-mer-based error trimming, and a method for the analysis of error profiles in short reads using a streaming sublinear approach. These tools are implemented in the khmer software package, which is freely available under the BSD License at github.com/ged-lab/khmer/ .