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Updated: Apr 16, 2026

Combining Analysis of DNA in a Crude Virion Extraction with the Analysis of RNA from Infected Leaves to Discover New Virus Genomes
Published on: July 27, 2018
IVA: accurate de novo assembly of RNA virus genomes
Martin Hunt1, Astrid Gall1, Swee Hoe Ong1
1Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK.
Motivation:
An accurate genome assembly from short read sequencing data is critical for downstream analysis, for example allowing investigation of variants within a sequenced population. However, assembling sequencing data from virus samples, especially RNA viruses, into a genome sequence is challenging due to the combination of viral population diversity and extremely uneven read depth caused by amplification bias in the inevitable reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction amplification process of current methods.
Results:
We developed a new de novo assembler called IVA (Iterative Virus Assembler) designed specifically for read pairs sequenced at highly variable depth from RNA virus samples. We tested IVA on datasets from 140 sequenced samples from human immunodeficiency virus-1 or influenza-virus-infected people and demonstrated that IVA outperforms all other virus de novo assemblers.
Availability And Implementation:
The software runs under Linux, has the GPLv3 licence and is freely available from http://sanger-pathogens.github.io/iva
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