The bioinformatics of viral metagenomics

Abstract

Metagenomic methods provide the veterinary and public health sciences with the promise of new and improved diagnostic tools with unprecedented ability to detect a plethora of known and unknown viromes in clinical samples. Successful metagenomics is based on three main activities where each one must be consistent and reliable for the method to be useful, these are (1) wet-lab preparation, (2) sequencing, and (3) bioinformatics analysis of the results.

The aim of the work is to provide insight into the feasibility of using the metagenomics approach for detection of emerging viruses, monitoring wildlife for known pathogens as well as providing a tool for rapid characterization of viral pathogens in outbreak situations from a veterinary standpoint.