Four distinct novel viruses were discovered via deep sequencing. Paired-end sequencing reads (2663 nt) of unknown origin were screened by tBlastx [61] against all known insect viruses present in GenBank [62] . Screening hits with an e-value greater than 1610 23 were used to target de novo contig assembly using the complete data set. Short contigs were screened by tBlastx against the non-redundant nucleotide database (NR) at an e-value threshold of 1610 25 . Hits to viral sequence, but not host sequences, were further assembled (see Materials and Methods). In each case, PCR primers were initially designed to bridge or confirm assembled contigs by Sanger sequencing. Confirmed contigs were extended with the PRICE assembler package (see Materials and Methods). In total, sequences from four novel viruses were recovered and Sanger validated. These include two members of Dicistroviridae, and two RNA viruses distantly related to Nodaviridae.