Chris Lauber, Xiaoyu Zhang, Josef Vaas, Franziska Klingler, Pascal Mutz, Arseny Dubin, Thomas Pietschmann, Olivia Roth, Benjamin W Neuman, Alexander E Gorbalenya, Ralf Bartenschlager, Stefan Seitz
Virus discovery by genomics and metagenomics empowered studies of viromes, facilitated characterization of pathogen epidemiology, and redefined our understanding of the natural genetic diversity of viruses with profound functional and structural implications. Here we employed a data-driven virus discovery approach that directly queries unprocessed sequencing data in a highly parallelized way and involves a targeted viral genome assembly strategy in a wide range of sequence similarity. By screening more than 269,000 datasets of numerous authors from the Sequence Read Archive and using two metrics that quantitatively assess assembly quality, we discovered 40 nidoviruses from six virus families whose members infect vertebrate hosts...
April 22, 2024: PLoS Pathogens