Metagenomic characterization of viral communities in corals: mining biological signal from methodological noise

Abstract

Reef-building corals form close associations with organisms from all three domains of life and therefore have many potential viral hosts. Yet knowledge of viral communities associated with corals is barely explored. This complexity presents a number of challenges in terms of the metagenomic assessments of coral viral communities and requires specialized methods for purification and amplification of viral nucleic acids, as well as virome annotation. In this minireview, we conduct a meta-analysis of the limited number of existing coral virome studies, as well as available coral transcriptome and metagenome data, to identify trends and potential complications inherent in different methods. The ..