Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery
R. C. Edgar et al. · Jan 26, 2022
They built a fast search tool that found over 100,000 new RNA viruses in public data, vastly expanding our known virus library.
In short
Researchers built a powerful cloud system called Serratus to search through 5.7 million environmental samples for signs of unknown RNA viruses. This massive effort uncovered more than 100,000 new virus species, increasing the total number of known viral types by about ten times. The discovery is significant because finding these hidden viruses helps scientists understand how dangerous pathogens evolve and improves our ability to predict future outbreaks.
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- Field
- Ecology
- Authors
- R. C. Edgar, Brie Taylor, Victor Lin, Tomer Altman, Pierre Barbera, Dmitry Meleshko, Dan Lohr, Gherman Novakovsky, Benjamin Buchfink, Basem Al-Shayeb, Jillian F. Banfield, Marcos de la Peña, Anton Korobeynikov, Rayan Chikhi, Artem Babaian
- Published
- Jan 26, 2022
- Cited by
- 553 papers
- Kept since
- Sep 26, 2026
- How I rank it
- 3 of 5
- Found by
- The discovery feed