Comparative evaluation of bioinformatic tools for virus-host prediction and their application to a highly diverse community in the Cuatro Cienegas Basin, Mexico.

ABSTRACT: Due to the enormous diversity of non-culturable viruses, new viruses must be characterized using culture-independent techniques. The associated host is an important phenotypic feature that can be inferred from metagenomic viral contigs thanks to the development of several bioinformatic tools. Here, we compare the performance of recently developed virus-host prediction tools on a dataset of 1,046 virus-host pairs and then apply the best-performing tools to a metagenomic dataset derived from a highly diverse transiently hypersaline site known as the Archaean Domes (AD) within the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin, Coahuila, Mexico. Among host-dependent methods, alignment-based approaches had a precision of 66.07% and a sensitivity of 24.76%, while alignment-free methods had an average precision of 75.7%

SUBMITTER: Cisneros-Martinez AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10833507 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature