k-mers (or x-mers where x can be virtually any consonant of choice) usually refer to specific n-tuples or n-grams of nucleic acid or amino acid sequences that can be used to identify certain regions within biomolecules like DNA (e.g. for gene prediction) or proteins. Either k-mers strings as such can be used for finding regions of interest, or k-mer statistics giving discrete probability distributions of a number of possible k-mer combinations (or rather permutation with repetitions) are used. Specific short k-mers are called oligomers or "oligo"s for short. See also: polymer
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