Expanding Our Knowledge of Viral Evolution

When the pandemic forced scientists to consider remote working strategies, many groups turned to online bioinformatic research. A team led by Dr. Christopher Buck at the US National Cancer Institute turned lockdown lemons into lemonade. They reoriented away from their usual work directly discovering viruses in clinical specimens to a broader, more comprehensive search aimed at finding viruses lurking in publicly available deep sequencing datasets. The remote-work project uncovered hundreds of previously unknown virus species associated with a wide range of animals. The discoveries shed new light on the deep evolutionary roots of viruses.