Edgar, R.C., Taylor, J., Lin, V. et al. Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery. [Full text – Free] Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04332-2: “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 exponentially. 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 delta virus and huge phages, respectively, and analysed their environmental reservoirs. To catalyse the ongoing revolution of viral discovery, we established a free and comprehensive database of these data and tools. Expanding the known sequence diversity of viruses can reveal the evolutionary origins of emerging pathogens and improve pathogen surveillance for the anticipation and mitigation of future pandemics…

Identification of Earth’s virome is a fundamental step in preparing for the next pandemic. We lay the foundations for future research by enabling direct access to 883,502 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP)-containing sequences, which include the RdRP from 131,957 novel RNA viruses (sequences with greater than 10% divergence from a known RdRP), including 9 novel coronaviruses. Altogether this captures the collective efforts of over a decade of sequencing studies in a free repository, available at https://serratus.io.