A k-mer Based Approach for SARS-CoV-2 Variant Identification.

With the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) across the globe and its continuous mutation, it is of pivotal importance to design a system to identify different known (and unknown) variants of SARS-CoV-2. Identifying particular variants helps to understand and model their spread patterns, design effective mitigation strategies, and prevent future outbreaks. It also plays a crucial role in studying the efficacy of known vaccines against each variant, and modeling the likelihood of breakthrough infections. It is well known that the spike protein contains most of the information/variation pertaining to coronavirus variants.