Table 4 Validated pathogen identifications in patients with neurological infections have high numbers of unique k-mers per read. The pathogens were identified with as few as 15 reads, but the high number of unique k-mers indicates distinct locations of the reads along their genomes. Re-alignment of mapped reads to their reference genomes (column “Covered bases”) corroborates the finding of the unique k-mers (see also Additional file 1: Figure S4). Interestingly, the k-mer count in PT5 indicates that there might be multiple strains present in the sample since the k-mers cover more than one genome. Read lengths were 150–250 bp

From: KrakenUniq: confident and fast metagenomics classification using unique k-mer counts