DNA k-mers underlie much of our assembly work, and we (along with many others!) have spent a lot of time thinking about how to store k-mer graphs efficiently, discard redundant data, and count them efficiently.
More recently, we've been enthused about using k-mer based similarity measures and computing and searching k-mer-based sketch search databases for all the things.
But I haven't spent too much talking about using k-mers for taxonomy, although that has become an ahem area of interest recently, if you read into our papers a bit.
In this blog post I'm going to fix this by doing a little bit of a literature review and waxing enthusiastic about other people's work. Then in a future blog post I'll talk about how we're building off of this work in fun! and interesting? ways!
