K-mer Counting: memory-efficient strategy, parallel computing and field of application for Bioinformatics

Abstract

Currently, k-mer counting is an important algorithm for bioinformatics research. This review lists the major application fields of k-mer counting in Bioinformatics at the beginning. Next, we introduce the commonly used memory-efficient strategy for k-mer counting tools, because the large amount of memory request is a bottleneck of k-mer counting tools. Next we illustrate the current parallel computing technologies for k-mer counting tool. Finally, we discuss the future study for k-mer counting.