Viral Metagenomics: A Review

Abstract

Sequencing technology has shown significant improvement since its first installment in 1977 by Frederick Sanger and colleagues. The Human Genome Project resulted in great refinement of sequencing technology with many promising discoveries. These newer sequencing technologies are called the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies. Public Health and Veterinary scientists started picking up NGS technology in a number of animal disease diagnosis including the discovery of Schmallenberg viruses. A review on the use of NGS technology in animal disease diagnosis including discovery of novel microbes, differentiation of various pathotypes, evolutionary aspect of microbes and host-pathogen interaction, transcriptomics (RNA-sequencing), disease surveillance etc. is dealt with in here. With the continuous decent in the cost of DNA sequencing it is estimated that NGS would become the gold standard in the molecular diagnosis of animal diseases. What has to be undermined is that most of the efforts in the area of animal disease diagnosis related to NGS stops once a novel microbe or evolutionary pattern has been identified without further studies on the pathogenicity and related effects on the host.