New research article in Virus Research

In collaboration with Prof. Ralf Bartenschlager and Dr. Stefan Seitz (University of Heidelberg and DKFZ Heidelberg), Chris Lauber und Michael Seifert published the research article "Discovery of highly divergent lineages of plant-associated astro-like viruses sheds light on the emergence of potyviruses" in the special issue Virus Bioinformatics of Virus Research.

The study is part of a larger project aiming to discover unknown viruses by mining a large database of sequencing data, the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). A previous study already showed that primary data from the SRA can be used to find new viruses infecting vertebrates and to analyze their evolution. Now, the approach was extended to plants, resulting in the discovery of a dozen novel viral genomes that bring new insights into the emergence of the largest virus family infecting plants, the potyviruses.

The time-consuming screening of the sequencing data was done using the high performance computers of the computing center (ZIH) of TU Dresden. Further details about the study can be found under "Selected HPC Projects" on the web site of the ZIH.