Defining quality virus data(sets)

International consortium offers guidelines, best practices for characterizing uncultivated viruses Microbes in, on and around the planet are said to outnumber the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. The total number of viruses is expected to vastly exceed even that calculation. While many viruses remain unknown and uncultivated, advances in genome sequencing and analyses have allowed researchers to identify more than 750,000 uncultivated virus genomes from metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data sets. In IMG/VR, a database for virus sequences established and maintained by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, the viral diversity available has tripled within a single year. 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 a report published December 17, 2018, in Nature Biotechnology, JGI partnered...