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Eric Coissac caf59b5658 Update documentation for CLI command renames and new commands
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<h1 id="kmers-and-super-kmers">Kmers and super-kmers</h1>
<h2 id="kmers">Kmers</h2>
<p>A <strong>kmer</strong> is a DNA subsequence of fixed length <span class="arithmatex">\(k\)</span>. Two constraints apply to <span class="arithmatex">\(k\)</span>, both enforced when a command starts (an invalid value exits immediately with an error):</p>
<ul>
<li><span class="arithmatex">\(k \in [11, 31]\)</span>: long enough to be specific, short enough to fit in a single 64-bit word at 2 bits/base (<span class="arithmatex">\(k \le 32\)</span> is the hard limit; <span class="arithmatex">\(k &lt; 11\)</span> gives insufficient specificity).</li>
<li><span class="arithmatex">\(k\)</span> <strong>is odd</strong>: an odd-length sequence can never equal its own reverse complement, so the two orientations of any kmer are always distinct. This is required for the canonical form (see <a href="../encoding/">DNA encoding</a>) to be well defined.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="super-kmers">Super-kmers</h2>
<p>A <strong>super-kmer</strong> is a maximal run of consecutive, overlapping kmers from a read that share the same canonical minimizer (see <a href="../minimizer_selection/">Minimizer selection</a>). Each kmer in the run overlaps the next by <span class="arithmatex">\(k-1\)</span> nucleotides. A super-kmer is capped at 256 nucleotides; a longer run is split at that boundary.</p>
<p>For a random minimizer of length <span class="arithmatex">\(m\)</span> over kmers of length <span class="arithmatex">\(k\)</span>, the expected length of a super-kmer is approximately (Golan &amp; Shur 2025; Zheng <em>et al.</em> 2020)<sup id="fnref:Zheng2020-ji"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:Zheng2020-ji">1</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:Golan2025-xf"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:Golan2025-xf">2</a></sup>:</p>
<div class="arithmatex">\[L_{\text{nt}} \approx \frac{k-m+2}{2} + k - 1\]</div>
<p>For <span class="arithmatex">\(k=31\)</span>, <span class="arithmatex">\(m=13\)</span> this is about 40 nucleotides; in practice super-kmers rarely exceed a few dozen nucleotides.</p>
<h3 id="canonical-super-kmers">Canonical super-kmers</h3>
<p>A <strong>canonical super-kmer</strong> is the lexicographic minimum of a super-kmer and its reverse complement. When a read and its reverse complement are both encountered, they produce super-kmers that are reverse complements of each other; both reduce to the same canonical super-kmer, so a genomic region is represented once regardless of which strand was read.</p>
<p>Super-kmers are the unit of work used throughout construction and querying: sequences are decomposed into super-kmers first, and every downstream step (partition routing, deduplication, counting) operates on them rather than on individual kmers.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:Zheng2020-ji">
<p>Zheng, H., Kingsford, C. &amp; Marçais, G. (2020). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa472">Improved design and analysis of practical minimizers</a>. <em>Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)</em>, 36, i119--i127.&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:Zheng2020-ji" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:Golan2025-xf">
<p>Golan, S. &amp; Shur, A.M. (2025). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82670-2\_25">Expected density of random minimizers</a>. In: <em>Lecture notes in computer science</em>, Lecture notes in computer science. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, pp. 347--360.&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:Golan2025-xf" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p>
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