Speaker
Description
Jingmenviruses are understudied flavi-like viruses with a segmented genome. They have been detected worldwide in a wide range of hosts, such as arthropods including ticks and vertebrates including cattle and humans with febrile illness symptoms. As next-generation sequencing has become more affordable, increasing numbers of large-scale metagenomics studies have been published, alongside raw sequencing data. With the growing number of new jingmenvirus sequences identified in metagenomics data, it can be difficult to assess whether a new sequence is a new virus strain, genotype, or species.
We screened data from studies that did not search for or report jingmenvirus sequences using the online tools Serratus.io and NCBI Sequencing Reads Archive, looking for new jingmenvirus-related sequences. We then systematically compared all jingmenvirus sequences to determine demarcation criteria based on the distribution of evolutionary distances upon pairwise comparison.
We report the discovery of dozens of novel jingmenvirus partial and complete genomic sequences, in a wide range of sample types and geographical locations. Using these data and all published jingmenvirus sequences, we propose cut-off values both in percentage identity and patristic distance to classify jingmenvirus sequences into virus species or strain for each genomic segment.
Jingmenviruses are under-characterised and need to be studied thoroughly as they have a strong potential for emergence. In this study, we identify novel jingmenvirus sequences, confirm their ubiquity and One Health dimension, and provide tools to better classify new jingmenvirus sequences.
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