Artist rendering of genome standards being applied to deciphering the extensive diversity of viruses. (Illustration by Leah Pantéa)

“Viruses are critical components of every microbial ecosystem. The JGI is especially interested in developing standards for virus genomes because we generate much of this data ourselves,” said JGI research scientist and first author Simon Roux.

As more and more researchers continue to assemble new genome sequences of uncultivated viruses, JGI researchers led a community effort to develop guidelines and best practices for defining virus data quality. In  Nature Biotechnology, JGI partnered with a number of virus experts; as well as representatives from the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), an open-membership working body that engages the research community in the standards development process; and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the premier authority on the official taxonomy of viruses which is currently re-evaluating virus classification based on sequence-based information.

“The tremendous growth of virus sequence data, and microbiome data in general, necessitates robust standards and data quality metrics to allow the research community to leverage this data for comparative analyses,” said JGI Metagenome Program head and study senior author Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh. Click here to read the full story on the JGI website.