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Updated: Oct 5, 2025
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Isolation of Fidelity Variants of RNA Viruses and Characterization of Virus Mutation Frequency
Published on: June 16, 2011
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Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery
Robert C Edgar1, Brie Taylor2, Victor Lin3
1Independent researcher, Corte Madera, CA, USA.
Nature
|January 27, 2022
Summary
Researchers developed Serratus, a cloud infrastructure for ultra-high-throughput sequence alignment. This tool identified over 100,000 novel RNA viruses, significantly expanding known viral diversity and aiding future pandemic preparedness.
Area of Science:
- Bioinformatics
- Virology
- Computational Biology
Background:
- Public nucleic acid sequence databases are vast (over 20 petabases) but difficult to explore due to inefficient search methods.
- Exponential growth of sequence data necessitates advanced computational tools for systematic analysis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a cloud computing infrastructure for ultra-high-throughput sequence alignment at the petabase scale.
- To identify novel RNA viruses within a large, diverse dataset.
- To establish a comprehensive database for viral discovery data and tools.
Main Methods:
- Development of Serratus, a cloud computing infrastructure for petabase-scale sequence alignment.
- Searching 10.2 petabases of sequence data from 5.7 million diverse samples.
- Targeted search for the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene to identify RNA viruses.
Main Results:
- Identification of over 10^5 novel RNA viruses, increasing known species by an order of magnitude.
- Characterization of novel viruses related to coronaviruses, hepatitis delta virus, and large phages.
- Analysis of the environmental reservoirs for newly discovered viruses.
Conclusions:
- Serratus enables efficient, large-scale viral discovery.
- Expanded viral sequence diversity provides insights into pathogen evolution.
- The developed database and tools facilitate ongoing viral discovery and enhance pandemic surveillance.
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