Kavli Affiliate: Robert Edwards
| Authors: Cedric Lood, Swapnil Doijad, Evelien Adriaenssens, Yiming Bao, Jakub Barylski, Benjamin Bolduc, George Bouras, Rodney J. Brister, Titus C. Brown, Antonio Pedro Camargo, Lander De Coninck, Sebastian Deorowicz, Robert Edgar, Robert Edwards, Shitao Gong, Arthur Gruber, Adam Gudys, Ernestina Hauptfeld, Anneliek ter Horst, Tianyang Huang, Jingzhe Jiang, Lars Kaderali, Jaebeom Kim, Mart Krupovic, Jens H. Kuhn, Elliott Lefkowitz, Matthieu Leobold, Shuai-Cheng Li, Yiyun Liu, Bastiaan F.A. von Meijenfeldt, Uri Neri, Judit Penzes, Tessa Pierce-Ward, Janina Rahlff, Alejandro Reyes Munoz, Luisa Rubino, Sead Sabanodzovic, Jiayu Shang, Peter Simmonds, Martin Steinegger, Matthew Sullivan, Yanni Sun, LIli Tian, Yigang Tong, Robert Turnbull, Dann Turner, Arvind Varsani, Ziye Wang, Yasas Wijesekara, Wytamma Wirth, Haolong Xia, Shuo Yang, Tze-Ching Yeo, Jinbei Z hang, Xianglilan Zhang, Shanfeng Zhu, Andrzej Zielezinski, Simon Roux and Bas E. Dutilh
| Summary:
The rapid rate of virus discovery renders manual curation by taxonomy experts increasingly impractical, creating a need for reliable software that can reproducibly assign viral contigs to taxa at all fifteen ranks of the virus taxonomy. We led an open community challenge for the computational taxonomic classification of viruses and assembled a dataset of virus sequences combining expert-curated and metagenomic sequences. Seventeen teams contributed a total of thirty-four automated, fully reproducible classification pipelines. Most tools correctly assigned viruses belonging to established species, genera, or families, but viruses that are unclassified at those lower ranks remain challenging. This study provides datasets, open-source software, novel approaches, and recommendations to benchmark computational taxonomic classification of viruses, and support organizing the many viruses discovered in big omics data.