An international team in several research centers around the world, including Spanish scientists from the CSIC, has used a cloud computing program to analyze millions of viral samples from all over the planet. The finding will allow knowing the origin of emerging pathogens such as coronaviruses and monitoring pandemics.
The research has revealed the existence of more than 130,000 new RNA viruses after the analysis of 5.7 million biological samples collected around the world over the last 15 years. The finding represents an increase of up to 10 times in the number of viral RNA species known to date. Viruses are the largest set of biological agents known.
The study, published by the journal Nature, has had the participation of research centers and universities from Germany, Russia, France, Canada, the USA and Spain. This multidisciplinary team has used Serratus, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing system that, using a scheme of 22,500 interconnected computers, has carried out massive searches for viral sequences in the sequencing information available in databases. public data.
Analysis of viral families detected more than 30 new coronavirus species, many of them in fish and amphibians. Unlike the coronaviruses described so far, these species presented a fragmented genome in two parts, a characteristic never seen before in coronaviruses.
Evolutionary connection between species
The Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants of Valencia (IBMCP), a joint center of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, has participated in the study. Its scientists analyzed the virus that causes hepatitis D in humans, called Delta and of unknown origin.
With the help of Serratus, the IBMCP also detected similar viruses in other mammalian vertebrates and even invertebrates. In the environmental samples with viruses similar to hepatitis D there were other viral forms with an ultra-compact genome and tiny size (only 300 bases, the chemical units that make up the genetic material). “This discovery allows us to advance a close evolutionary connection between viruses as distant as human hepatitis D and plant subviral agents called viroids,” Marcos de la Peña Rivero, a researcher at the IBMCP, told the CSIC press service.
The result of the work, in the form of a database with all the viruses detected and the set of tools developed, is freely accessible at www.serratus.io. In this way, Serratus proves useful for characterizing the existing viral diversity on the planet and preparing the world for new pandemics.
