Identifying viruses from metagenomic data using deep learning

The recent development of metagenomic sequencing makes it possible to massively sequence microbial genomes including viral genomes without the need for laboratory culture. Existing reference-based and gene homology-based methods are not efficient in identifying unknown viruses or short viral sequences from metagenomic data.

Here we developed a reference-free and alignment-free machine learning method, DeepVirFinder, for identifying viral sequences in metagenomic data using deep learning.