How To Install kmc on Debian 10

Learn how to install kmc on Debian 10 with this tutorial. kmc is count kmers in genomic sequences

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install kmc on Debian 10.

What is kmc

kmc is:

The kmc software is designed for counting k-mers (sequences of consecutive k symbols) in a set of reads. K-mer counting is important for many bioinformatics applications, e.g. developing de Bruijn graph assemblers.

Building de Bruijn graphs is a commonly used approach for genome assembly with data from second-generation sequencing. Unfortunately, sequencing errors (frequent in practice) result in huge memory requirements for de Bruijn graphs, as well as long build time. One of the popular approaches to handle this problem is filtering the input reads in such a way that unique k-mers (very likely obtained as a result of an error) are discarded.

Thus, KMC scans the raw reads and produces a compact representation of all non-unique reads accompanied with number of their occurrences. The algorithm implemented in KMC makes use mostly of disk space rather than RAM, which allows one to use KMC even on rather typical personal computers. When run on high-end servers (what is necessary for KMC competitors) it outperforms them in both memory requirements and speed of computation. The disk space necessary for computation is in order of the size of input data (usually it is smaller).

There are three methods to install kmc on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install kmc Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install kmc using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install kmc

Install kmc Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install kmc using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install kmc

Install kmc Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install kmc using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install kmc

How To Uninstall kmc on Debian 10

To uninstall only the kmc package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove kmc

Uninstall kmc And Its Dependencies

To uninstall kmc and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove kmc

Remove kmc Configurations and Data

To remove kmc configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge kmc

Remove kmc configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove kmc configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge kmc

Dependencies

kmc have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install kmc package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.