Virome Assembly and Annotation: A Surprise in the Namib Desert

Researchers uncovered evidence suggesting that viruses may have been transported from the Atlantic Ocean into the Namib Desert, potentially via fog and wind. This hypothesis emerged from phylogenetic analyses of circovirus-like proteins and scaffold network analysis of a virome dataset from a copper-rich site in the Namib Sand Sea. The study also highlighted the importance of strict data filtering and advanced biocomputational methods for accurate viral genome assembly and annotation, demonstrating that CLC-Workbench outperformed other assemblers in reconstructing large scaffolds and handling excessive read coverage.

Hesse, U., van Heusden, P., Kirby, B. M., Olonade, I., van Zyl, L. J., & Trindade, M. (2017). Virome Assembly and Annotation: A Surprise in the Namib Desert. Frontiers in Microbiology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2017.00013