Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Virology. Aug 12, 2015; 4(3): 265-276
Published online Aug 12, 2015. doi: 10.5501/wjv.v4.i3.265
Next-generation sequencing in clinical virology: Discovery of new viruses
Sibnarayan Datta, Raghvendra Budhauliya, Bidisha Das, Soumya Chatterjee, Vanlalhmuaka, Vijay Veer
Sibnarayan Datta, Raghvendra Budhauliya, Bidisha Das, Soumya Chatterjee, Vanlalhmuaka, Vijay Veer, Molecular Virology Laboratory, Defence Research Laboratory (DRDO), Tezpur, Assam, PIN-784001, India
Author contributions: Datta S conceptualized and designed the review; Datta S, Budhauliya R and Das B drafted the manuscript; Chatterjee S, Vanlalhmuaka and Veer V edited and critically revised the manuscript.
Supported by The author’s laboratory is supported by the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Ministry of Defence, Government of India.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interest related to the submitted manuscript.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Sibnarayan Datta, PhD, Molecular Virology Laboratory, Defence Research Laboratory (DRDO), Post bag No. 2, Tezpur, Assam, PIN-784001, India. sndatta1978@gmail.com
Telephone: +91-3712-258508 Fax: +91-3712-258534
Received: January 24, 2015
Peer-review started: January 27, 2015
First decision: March 6, 2015
Revised: March 23, 2015
Accepted: May 7, 2015
Article in press: May 8, 2015
Published online: August 12, 2015
Processing time: 200 Days and 10.6 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Rapid development and commercial availability of next-generation sequencers (NGS) systems have dramatically changed almost every field of biological research, especially microbiology and metagenomics. Different NGS systems have been adapted and used for numerous applications in virology too. These systems are capable of rapidly sequencing and analyzing a complex mixture of nucleic acid templates, in a massively parallel fashion, making them ideal tools for viral metagenomics and discovery. This manuscript reviews the prevailing NGS technologies, their application in virus discovery to serve as a guide for the readers, working in the field of virology, public health and in biothreat mitigation programs.