Hecatomb: An End-to-End Research Platform for Viral Metagenomics

Analysis of viral diversity using modern nucleic acid sequencing technologies presents several unique challenges. Foremost being that virus detection requires a non-targeted, random (shotgun) approach. This process collects sequences not only from the viral fraction of the sample, but also from other biological sources. Annotation and enumeration of collected sequences requires rigorous quality control, effective search strategies against relevant reference sequence databases and statistical and visualisation strategies to evaluate results. Here we introduce hecatomb , a bioinformatics platform enabling end-to-end virome sequence analysis. Hecatomb enables both read and contig based analysis and integrates query information from both amino acid and nucleotide reference sequence databases. Hecatomb prioritizes integration of data collected throughout the workflow as well as with external viral data sources. This process results in a rich, high-dimensional data which can be used by researchers to rigorously evaluate their results. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.