KmerSignificance Score: A discriminative and biologically-informed framework for viral k-mer prioritization (opens in new tab)

Distinguishing closely related viral strains requires identifying genomic regions where subtle sequence differences carry biological significance. While k-mer-based approaches offer computational efficiency for genome analysis, existing methods lack standardized frameworks for evaluating which k-mers are most informative. Current selection strategies focus primarily on statistical discriminative power without integrating biological relevance. We introduce KmerSignificance Score (KSS), a k-mer...