Sunday, September 18, 2016

How to Detect Circular Virus Genomes from Metagenomes


Many virus genomes are circular, like the olympic rings.
When analyzing virus metagenomic data, we often find it helpful to identify contigs that represent complete circular genomes [1,2]. In addition to offering biological information, this is used as a quality control technique to evaluate whether the sequencing efforts were robust enough to allow for complete genome assembly. This approach has the advantage of reference independence because it does not require aligning reads to a reference genome to evaluate sequence completion.