Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery

Public databases contain a planetary collection of nucleic acid sequences, but their systematic exploration has been inhibited by a lack of efficient methods for searching this corpus, which (at the time of writing) exceeds 20 petabases and is growing exponentially1. Here we developed a cloud computing infrastructure, Serratus, to enable ultra-high-throughput sequence alignment at the petabase scale. We searched 5.7 million biologically diverse samples (10.2 petabases) for the hallmark gene RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and identified well over 105 novel RNA viruses, thereby expanding the number of known species by roughly an order of magnitude. We characterized novel viruses related to coronaviruses, hepatitis…

• DV
  Diamond V
• AN
  Agence Nationale de la Recherche

  Awards: ANR-18-CE45-0020, ANR-19-P3IA-0001, 19-P3IA-0001, ANR-18, ANR-19
• MD
  Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad

  Award: PID2020-116008GB-I00
• SP
  Saint Petersburg State University
• UO
  University of British Columbia
• RS
  Russian Science Foundation

  Awards: 19-14-00172, grant 19-14-00172
• KT
  Klaus Tschira Stiftung