A New Tool to Detect Viruses in Sequence Data
A new software algorithm developed at Caltech enables researchers to easily search for viruses in RNA sequence data, enabling scientists to detect viruses in samples and study how they impact biological functions.
The number of individual viruses on Earth is nearly unfathomable: There are an estimated 10 million individual viruses for each star in the universe. Viruses are everywhere, even if they are not causing disease, and there are still many unexplored questions about how they impact our daily lives. For example, it is theorized that some neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, may have their origins in viral infections. The new algorithm, built on an existing software tool called kallisto, can now reveal the workings of this previously invisible viral world.
The research was conducted in the laboratory of Lior Pachte, Bren Professor of Computational Biology and Computing and Mathematical Sciences. A paper describing the research appears on DATE in the journal Nature Biotechnology.