MetaviralSPAdes—New assembler for virus genomes
Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - 11:00
in Biology & Nature
When a new virus emerges, biologists rush to reconstruct its genome—a prerequisite for future diagnostic and vaccine development. The challenge with viral sequencing during an outbreak is that a sample from a patient, like saliva from a COVID-19 patient that was used for the very first SARS-COV-2 coronavirus sequencing effort, contains genomes of many other, often harmless, viruses. Not to mention hundreds of much larger bacterial genomes that live in our mouth and make it difficult to find the viral sequences among them.