Serratus: Hacking Earth's Virome
Channel: ababaian
Date: 2022-07-14

Talk from Intelligent Systems For Molecular Biology 2022 - COVID19 Special Session
- Project page: https://www.serratus.io
- Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04332-2

Abstract
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Over the past 14 years the global biology community has captured and shared over 30 petabases (3 x 10^16 nucleobases) of Earth’s genetic sequence data. These millions of samples cover all continents, oceans, thousands of animals and plant species, deep wilderness environments, and are valued at $3.9+ billion dollars.

To search for the (evolutionary) origins of SARS-CoV-2 and uncover Earth’s RNA viral diversity, the open science Serratus team analyzed 5.7 million sequencing libraries. In a single 11-day experiment we identified 130,000+ novel species of RNA viruses; this is an approximately an order of magnitude increase over all 15,000 known RNA viruses that were described up until that point, including nine new species of Coronaviruses.

We are rapidly progressing towards the exabase era of computational biology, thus this near order-of-magnitude increase in the RNA virome is superficial, merely a starting point to more fundamental questions: What lessons did COVID19 teach us for constructing a planetary-scale pandemic warning systems? How are we going to interpret the ~100 million RNA viruses which will be discovered by the end of the decade?

email: artem [AT] rRNA [dot] ca