Synthetic community Hi-C benchmarking provides a baseline for virus-host inferences.

ABSTRACT: Microbiomes influence diverse ecosystems, and viruses increasingly appear to impose key constraints. While viromics has expanded genomic catalogs, host identification for these viruses remains challenging due to the limitations in scaling cultivation-based approaches and the uncertain reliability and relative low resolution of in silico predictions - particularly for understudied viral taxa. Towards this, Hi-C proximity ligation uses sequenced, cross-linked virus and host genomic fragments to infer virus-host linkages and has now been applied in at least ten studies. However, its accuracy remains unknown. Here we assess Hi-C performance in recovering virus-host interactions using synthetic communities (SynComs) composed of four marine bacterial strains and nine phages with known int

SUBMITTER: Shatadru RN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11844479 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature