ENVirT: inference of ecological characteristics of viruses from metagenomic data

Abstract

Background: Estimating the parameters that describe the ecology of viruses,particularly those that are novel, can be made possible using metagenomic approaches. However, the best-performing existing methods require databases to first estimate an average genome length of a viral community before being able to estimate other parameters, such as viral richness. Although this approach has been widely used, it can adversely skew results since the majority of viruses are yet to be catalogued in databases. Results: In this paper, we present ENVirT, a method for estimating the richness of novel viral mixtures, and for the first time we also show that it is possible to simultaneously estimate the av..