Traditional viral detection methods, such as serology, virus isolation, and PCR, are optimized for the detection of known agents [2] . However, novel and highly divergent viruses are not easily detected by approaches that rely on a priori sequence, antigen, or cell tropism knowledge. PCR-based assays that employ degenerate primers may successfully target conserved regions within related virus groups, but unlike bacteria, viruses lack universally conserved genetic regions, such as ribosomal RNA, that can be exploited to amplify all viruses [8] .