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assemblers choose high k-mers: what does that mean?

I am co-assembling metagenomic PE reads. megahitand metaSPAdesconsistently choose the final assembly as one based on the longest k-mer (141).

What does that tell about my input data and the assembly? Any cause for joy or concern?

assembly metagenomic
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written by willnotburn • willnotburn

1 answer

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

Thanks, genomax. A lot in 1st and 3rd papers is - and will likely always be - outside of my field.

But I am happy to have gleaned one thing from your second bullet point. If the best k-mer length is often 80% of read length, then the longest available k-mer (141 for megahit and 127 for metaSPAdes) would make sense for my input data, which is PE 250bp.

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written by willnotburn • willnotburn

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