Speaker: Rachel Cable (Duhaime lab)

In vitro and in silico decontamination of viral metagenomes
Although next generation sequencing has greatly increased our depth of knowledge on cultured and unculturable viruses in the environment, the contamination of non-viral (bacterial, host) genetic material occurs in almost all viral samples and can drastically reduce the amount of data we can acquire from virus-specific sequences. We have designed a study to assess the efficiency of both in vitro decontamination methods (DNaseI, chloroform) and in silico sequence classification methods (CheckM, Virsorter/Virfinder, centrifuge) on ocean virus samples from the Southern Ocean. Stayed tuned for the results!